Ep. 766: The Truth About Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast

Episode 766: The Truth About Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)
Host: Steven Rinella
Guests: Dr. Mike Chamberlain (Warnell School of Forestry, Univ. of Georgia), Dr. Mark Ruder (College of Veterinary Medicine, Univ. of Georgia)
Date: September 22, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode is a comprehensive deep dive into Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a fatal neurological disease affecting deer species across North America. Host Steven Rinella brings together leading wildlife disease experts Dr. Mike Chamberlain and Dr. Mark Ruder to unravel myths, break down the latest research, and pose hard questions about the future of deer populations, deer hunting, and wild game consumption. The conversation addresses controversies, scientific unknowns, and the long, slow timeline over which CWD impacts wildlife and hunting culture, especially in light of recent high-prevalence findings from the Arkansas study.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding CWD: What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

(Main segment starting at [10:45])

• CWD is a prion disease: Abnormal proteins (prions) misfold, accumulate in the brain, and are not broken down by the body, resulting in neurological damage and “holes” in brain tissue (spongiform pathology).
  • Dr. Chamberlain analogy: Folding a fitted bed sheet—when folded wrong, it doesn’t work; when right, it functions as intended ([14:22]).
• Prion diseases are not unique to deer: Humans can get Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, cattle can contract mad cow (BSE), and sheep get scrapie.
• No human has contracted CWD to date. Health advisories are precautionary since experience with similar prion diseases raises concern for unknown risks.

Notable Quote

“It’s a 100% fatal disease.”
—Dr. Chamberlain ([20:47])

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2. Why Is There Controversy About CWD?

(Addressed throughout [21:04]–[26:51])

• Hunters' skepticism emerges from:
  • CWD’s prevalence in regions still boasting robust deer herds (“if it’s so bad, where are all the dying deer?”)
  • Frustration over management rules (“bait bans don’t make sense if deer socialize anyway”)
  • No documented human cases, but still advised not to eat positive deer
• Covid-19 comparisons: Both issues saw rapidly deployed, sometimes confusing, regulations without clear threats felt directly by everyone, leading to "we're done listening" attitudes ([26:16]).

Notable Quote

“We've hit a dangerous spot around CWD. A lot of guys are like, ‘I'm done.’ And I don’t think we should be done.”
—Steven Rinella ([26:32])

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3. CWD Progression and Time Scale: Population & Individual Impacts

(Main discussion [31:59]–[39:36], [44:06], [54:00])

• CWD doesn’t “crash” populations right away: It manifests slowly—decades before visible effects emerge.
• Prevalence curve:
  • Can hover at low levels (1–2%) for years, but then elevates, sometimes exponentially.
  • Populations may appear normal even as CWD builds, then suddenly shift to high infection/mortality rates.
• Contrast with “fast” deer diseases: EHD (hemorrhagic disease/blue tongue) kills rapidly and visibly; CWD operates slowly and cryptically.
• Survival statistics:
  • CWD+ does: 60% annual survival vs. 80% CWD–
  • CWD+ bucks: 40% vs. 70% ([79:17]–[80:03])
• Direct CWD mortality: About 20% of annual deaths in heavily affected populations are directly from the disease ([81:12]).

Notable Quote

“There are examples now of when we're at the end of that [prevalence] curve, like when we're decades down the road, we have glimpses into what that picture looks like.”
—Mark Ruder ([43:00])

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4. What Management Works—and Where?

(Key section [44:06]–[50:12], revisited [97:31])

• Toolbox approach: Carcass movement bans, bait bans, culling, etc. are sometimes effective, but only when applied early and aggressively.
• Victories are rare, but real:
  • New York successfully eradicated an early outbreak by rapid, aggressive action ([45:48]–[47:08]).
  • When detections come late, containment is no longer realistic and management shifts to “living with CWD.”
• Definition of success changes:
  • Early: eradicate or contain
  • Endemic: keep prevalence as low as possible, accept new “normal” population levels

Notable Quote

“...the populations are so far along... when you get up to 50%, your management options have changed. You're now thinking about the future sustainability of the population.”
—Dr. Chamberlain ([98:10])

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5. Arkansas Case Study: What Does a CWD Epidemic Look Like?

(Major findings presented [63:36]–[80:00])

• Arkansas, 2025:
  • Prevalence among mature bucks: 68%
  • Mature does: ~35%
  • Buck age structure “crashes”—hard to find 5+ year-old bucks
  • Population is declining at about 13–14% per year ([95:54])
• Field study involved:
  • GPS collaring, tracking, sampling
  • Both field and lab necropsy
  • Behavioral shifts in infected animals—less vigilance, odd movement, in some cases, more interaction with other CWD+ deer ([75:59])
• Frightening “new normal”:
  • 1–5 deer per square mile in high prevalence zones ([118:56])
  • Some areas with “you can’t find deer” ([119:02])

Notable Quote

“You can't find deer. You can drive around at night, you don't see deer...You're gonna get to some point where the population is going to stabilize…but it's not going back to where it was.”
—Dr. Chamberlain ([119:02])

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6. Future Outlooks, Uncertainties, and Hard Truths

(Scattered throughout, main wrap-up [140:39]–[157:55])

• CWD-resistant deer:
  • Some genotypes may delay CWD progression but not confer true resistance ([107:48]); genetic solutions are not imminent or straightforward.
  • Releasing "resistant" deer from game farms is controversial and possibly counterproductive ([115:53]).
• Is “do nothing” viable?
  • No: inaction will, over decades, lead to higher prevalence, expanded footprint, and lower deer herds ([129:34], [132:02]).
• “New normal” in high CWD areas:
  • Enduring lower densities, fewer mature bucks, and ongoing risk/uncertainty for hunters and managers
• No “silver bullet”:
  • All current management options are imperfect; efforts are aimed simply at slowing progression (“shroud of prevention beats shroud of reaction” – [154:55])
• Hunters' burdens:
  • Uncertainty over food safety (none of the experts will eat a burger made from CWD+ deer—[143:27])
  • Adapting cherished hunting traditions and land management dreams to new biological realities

Notable Quotes

“If you’re in an area with low prevalence... your best chance of keeping what you have is to keep prevalence low and to keep it out entirely.”
—Dr. Chamberlain ([156:36])

“The fight shouldn’t start when you find your first case. The fight should start before you find your first case.”
—Steven Rinella ([155:02])

“There’s a lot we don’t know about chronic wasting disease.”
—Mark Ruder ([134:15])

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “[CWD is] a 100% fatal disease.” —Dr. Chamberlain ([20:47])
• “We've hit a dangerous spot around conversations about CWD. A lot of guys are like, ‘I'm done.’ And I don’t think we should be done.” —Steven Rinella ([26:32])
• “About 20% of all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. That’s in addition to predation and harvest...” —Dr. Chamberlain ([81:12])
• “The more you can keep [prevalence] suppressed, the more you suppress the very negative consequences at the population level.” —Mark Ruder ([49:55])
• “No, I wouldn't eat that burger [made from five CWD-positive deer].” —Dr. Chamberlain and Mark Ruder ([143:27])
• “I don’t expect you to listen to this and change everything you think…but if you just think carefully... this is a problem that is not going to just go away.” —Dr. Chamberlain ([156:36])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [10:45] — What CWD is, prion explanation
• [20:47] — Disease fatality clarified
• [26:32] — Reasons for hunter skepticism and “done” attitudes
• [31:59] — Discussion of timescale and prevalence curve
• [44:06] — Have management strategies ever worked?
• [63:36] — Arkansas study findings, age structure crash, population decline
• [79:17] — Survival statistics for CWD+ and negative deer
• [95:54] — Population now declining 13–14%/year
• [118:56] — Deer densities plummet to 1–5/sq mile in high prevalence Arkansas
• [140:39] — Efforts to manipulate the “new normal”
• [143:27] — Host/guest responses to the CWD+ burger challenge
• [155:02] — Prevention vs reaction
• [156:36] — Message to hunters: prevention, engagement, and context

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Key Takeaways (“At-Home Lessons” for Hunters)

• Prevention is crucial. If your area’s prevalence is low, support aggressive management and surveillance.
• CWD’s impact is slow and often invisible until suddenly it’s severe and irreversible.
• “Success” in CWD management is relative—early stages can be contained; later stages require learning to live with chronic disease and altered deer populations.
• Testing your deer and complying with agency recommendations are vital to preserve herd health and future hunting.
• There are no risk-free shortcuts, and no agency, researcher, or listener can wish the problem away.
• Accept uncertainty. Scientists are working with limited data, evolving understanding, and an infuriatingly complex disease.

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Final Thoughts

This episode underscores that CWD is a slow-building crisis for both wildlife and hunting culture. Rinella and guests urge listeners to cling to prevention, stay informed, and push for better research funding—because the uncomfortable reality is that “the fight shouldn’t start when you find your first case.” Hunters, landowners, and managers must act early, stick together, and resist the lure of denial if deer herds, hunting tradition, and wild venison are to survive for future generations.

Transcript

[Mark Ruder]

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[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Cal]

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[Dr. Chamberlain]

VGW Group void we're prohibited by law. 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

[Steven Rinella]

You ever feel that deep pull to the land to know it? To build something that lasts, that itch for your own wild country? Well, it ain't just a daydream. In 2025, it matters more than ever whether you're a lifelong hunter or just starting out, dreaming of land to explore, to leave something real. Or there is a trailhead where you can start. It's called land.com the biggest online network for rural property. Find the right agent and explore everything from timber tracks to ranches. Get the tools you need to buy that dream generational property. Stop dreaming about it and head to land.com. it's your place to find your open space. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

[Cal]

Hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't predict anything brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out@first light.com that's F I R S T L I T E.com all right, real quick. Right, Right up top before anything happens. You know it's hunting season when Phil starts prepping for a theater production.

[Cal]

That's how I mark the seasons too. Yeah, yeah, Phil.

[Steven Rinella]

Phil stepped away from theater. I never really stepped away. It's just tough.

[Cal]

It's tough on the family for me to do shows because I miss bedtime for months and it's just a lot of commuting. You know, I live out of town so.

[Steven Rinella]

And that one year he was kissing the other lady besides his wife, a whole bunch. I was in the play. He had to kiss a lady.

[Cal]

It was scandalous to no one besides Steve, but.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, rehearse that for all fall.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, I did.

[Cal]

I did one. As long as you keep it to the regularly scheduled rehearsals. That's correct. I did a play in January. Steve, you just weren't there. You didn't see it. I think the only person at the.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Company who saw it was Randall.

[Steven Rinella]

So you're prepping up now to do.

[Cal]

I'm doing Christmas Carol again, Round two.

[Steven Rinella]

You're doing it straight.

[Cal]

Yeah, I think we're doing it straight. We're no steampunk icing on it, which I think you were referring to.

[Steven Rinella]

That's why I wanted to talk. Touch on this very quickly.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

There's one modification.

[Cal]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

When they're always talking about buying that goose, you know.

[Cal]

Sure.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Cal]

The big Christmas goose.

[Steven Rinella]

A farthing. A shilling for a farthing. Like, is that an expensive goose or not? You know, I mean, I think if.

[Cal]

They just want us to be an expensive.

[Steven Rinella]

I know, but if they would. If you would just try this this year.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Switch it to US Currency and adjust for inflation.

[Cal]

Okay, so I'm listening.

[Steven Rinella]

The kids, like, $3 for a goose. Or maybe people in the crowd be like, oh, shit, that's a very expensive goose.

[Cal]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Or they.

[Cal]

They could say, you know, a shilling and a farthing, and then just turn to the audience, break character, and just kind of whisper.

[Steven Rinella]

Like. That'd be like. It's like $300 today.

[Cal]

Isn't that nuts? Can you. Okay, back to the program. Is it.

[Steven Rinella]

I would enjoy that place so much more.

[Cal]

Okay, Is the line.

[Steven Rinella]

Talk about that.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Cal]

Currency conversion live. Does he. Is it an actual line or is it from Scrooge where he says the biggest goose in all of London? Because wouldn't that imply it's going to be expensive?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cal]

When he's had a change of heart, I think, you know, but go buy the biggest goose you can find.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, something like that.

[Steven Rinella]

A farthing.

[Cal]

That's a great accent.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I could do that whole damn play. Yeah, I might.

[Cal]

You should. Christmas tours coming up.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, the Wild Turkey Doc is back. Now we're actually starting the show. The Wild Turkey Doc is back. Mike Chamberlain, very popular guest on the show, came in and tells you everything you ever want to know about turkeys. Today we're not talking about turkeys, though, except we're gonna talk about turkeys a little bit. Of course, we're here to talk about chronic wasting disease and an interesting. Some. Some interesting findings about that which is going to stir the old pot. The. The hoax. The CWD is a hoax. CWD is a scam pot. You know, the pot.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

A lot of guys stir in that pot.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

There are.

[Steven Rinella]

That is a big pot with lots of spoons. Mike. Dr. Chamberlain is from the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. He's the National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor. A. Or the.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

The.

[Steven Rinella]

The. There's only one.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Only one. This is the first endowed position that's turkey centric.

[Steven Rinella]

I might like to have that role.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Come on. I'm a few years from retirement and.

[Steven Rinella]

He leads the wild turkey lab. Mark Ruder, am I saying that right?

[Mark Ruder]

Correct.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, Mark, Reuters here, a colleague of Dr. Chamberlain's. He's from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. You got some accolades here that I don't understand. Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study. What's that mean?

[Mark Ruder]

So it's Squidus for short. You'll hear most in the wildlife community call it Squidus even though it has nothing to do with squids. Um, so we're a cooperative. So Squidus was founded in 1957 by state wildlife agencies in the southeastern United States.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

And it was really founded at a time where we had no, no capacity, no expertise within state wildlife management agencies for disease and health topics. And it was actually founded in the face of one of the better known diseases of white tailed deer, and that's hemorrhagic disease, EHD and blue tongue. And so we were founded at this time to sort of provide expertise, diagnostic capacity and understanding of diseases in white tailed deer at a time where restoration efforts were, you know, still kind of ongoing.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

Because the fear was that this disease was going to complicate the recovery of white tailed deer. And so states couldn't individually stand up capacity to have a person or facility for just focused on disease. So they went the cooperative model. And so that was a long time ago and we're still here. We have, Today we have 17 state wildlife agencies, one territory in the southeast, and then have federal partners, U.S. fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. geological Survey sort of provides our core sort of funding and we serve the states.

[Steven Rinella]

And you're the director.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Correct.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you carry one of these in your wallet? Someone gave me this.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Oh, not that, your insurance card.

[Steven Rinella]

It's this little card that if you start dying of something, it tells people.

[Mark Ruder]

What you do at the hospital.

[Steven Rinella]

Someone gave that to Me at Cornell. It tells people at the hospital, hey.

[Mark Ruder]

Man, I do some weird stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, you. I should give that card to you.

[Mark Ruder]

I don't have one of these cards.

[Steven Rinella]

But all of this, I feel obligated to give you that card because it apply more to your line of work than my line of work.

[Cal]

Oh, yeah. Does somebody ever go, have you ever come in contact with.

[Steven Rinella]

Have you been in contact with any animals that seem sick?

[Mark Ruder]

That's my job. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And then Dr. Callahan's here. Oh, he's not a doctor.

[Cal]

Got an honorary doctor. No, no, just straight up Callahan's grandpa.

[Steven Rinella]

Straight up old Cal. Doc. Doc. Doc Callahan's grandkid Callahan.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep. I like that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. We're gonna talk about some interesting findings around chronic wasting disease. And don't be worried. We will start out by talking about what in the hell is chronic wasting disease and why is it controversial? Not yet, because first let everybody know. We got. We got a new show coming out called Meat Eater Sheds. It drops Thursday, September 25th. We got episodes. We don't go into people's homes. We go into their sheds, barns, whatever. We profile their properties. We got one with Jeff Foxworthy's game room, Kevin Murphy's exceptionally chaotic shed, Heather Duville's fur processing facilities, and more. One episode every Thursday kicking off on September 25th. All right. I've been thinking about. For a couple minutes at a time, for days, I've been thinking about how to start this conversation. I think I want to start it like this. One of you guys and you can pick, you can, you can. Thumb wrestler. So who gets to do it? One of you guys has to, very quickly, just to get people up to speed, very quickly, explain what is chronic wasting disease. Okay. A super quick explanation of what is chronic wasting disease. Then I'm going to explain. I'm going to devil's advocate a little bit and I'm going to explain what guys on the street, in the bars. Not so much on the street, what guys in the field and in the bars say about it. Okay. In a way that will capture my own concerns and then capture the other people's concerns, and then we'll dig in. Is that fair?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Because I want to do a little bit about, like, what are we talking about? And then. And then kind of why someone should be paying attention to this.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All right.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. So chronic wasting disease is, if you, if you kind of think about it, 30,000 foot. So proteins. Or if you go back to grade school, proteins are comprised of amino acids. Right. They're the Building blocks.

[Steven Rinella]

I believe you.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Okay. So these amino acids that build these proteins are supposed to fold naturally, and they fold to support basic cell functions in the body. So what happens with CWD is you have this particular type of protein called a prion protein, and it misfolds. And we don't know why that misfolding occurs, but when it misfolds, the body can't shed the protein through enzymatic breakdowns like it would normally shed proteins. And so the proteins accumulate, and they tend to accumulate in the brain. And what that accumulation causes is neurological impairment. If you look at the brain through microscopically, it essentially looks like it has holes in it.

[Steven Rinella]

Why does something accumulating create holes?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Because the body cannot shed the protein. And so this is the dumb.

[Steven Rinella]

But I feel like that would make a ball, not a hole. If it was shedding too many, it'd make a hole. I mean, this is not coming from a professional person.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, Mark, what happens?

[Cal]

Yeah, it'd be like a tumor buildup.

[Mark Ruder]

A mass, versus once you have this, you know, the normal protein in the body, which we all have right now, it goes through a sort of a recycle process. Right. It's all a lot of proteins in our body are.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Are built.

[Mark Ruder]

And then after its sort of lifespan, enzymes in the body will kind of surgically kind of break it apart and recycle those components, and you start over with other proteins. Once this prion protein takes this different shape, then the enzymes that the body has to sort of snip it apart don't recognize it anymore. They can't get to those sites. And so rather than naturally degrade and recycle this protein over time, it just persists, and then it's sticky and more sort of kind of can glob onto it. And so you end up accumulating these proteins that your body can't break down anymore or the deer's body can't break down anymore. And so it's that accumulation of material in a very sensitive space. Neurons around neurons in the brain. This, your information superhighway, controls everything in your body. And you start to put stuff in there that's not supposed to be in there. It's going to be less efficient.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Have you ever tried to fold, say, a whole?

[Steven Rinella]

Do you mean the hole?

[Mark Ruder]

So how that start. What they're talking about is when you're looking at a tissue microscopically. So if we were to take a deer's brain out and cut it into super thin chips, you know, we put that on a microscope slide, we stain It. We look at it under a microscope, then you can see the individual cells and.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, at that level.

[Mark Ruder]

That level. So we're talking about in a neuron, which is. Right. It's kind of the workhorse of your. The central. Like the brain and sending information down to everywhere in your body. Those neurons that are the cell you can get. We call them vacuoles. Clear spaces. Basically, when you're looking at it in the neuron and around the neuron, and when you do a special stain to look at that, you'll see that's where this prion is accumulating. So you can see a lot of these. These prion proteins as abnormal prions accumulating in a very sensitive spot in the body.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I use the bed sheet analogy. Have you ever tried to fold a fitted bed sheet?

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you know what? It's funny you mentioned that. My wife is yelling at me a whole bunch the other night about that.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep. There's only. If you think about it, I was.

[Steven Rinella]

Almost gonna look it up.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

There's only one way.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't understand how she gets a legit fold.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Cal]

And so I was in my early 30s when we had a literal bar room discussion on what a duvet cover is. And that's when I learned what it. What it was.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I hate them. We use them, and I hate them.

[Cal]

Yeah. How I thought that that was an option.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep.

[Cal]

It's not a mandatory piece of bed kit.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a blanket. For your blanket.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. Years ago, when I. When I started reading about cwd, I was trying to think of an analogy that would allow me to conceptualize it in dumb mic speak. And I was like, okay, so these. These proteins are. They're folding, and it's misfolded. And the fitted bed sheet came to mind because I've never understood why I can't fold it and my wife can. But all I know is the way she does it is perfect, and it fits. And the way I do it and Mark does it and you do it is all wrong.

[Steven Rinella]

Mean to fold it up and put it on, like, a shelf.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes. It never fits in the same space.

[Steven Rinella]

Fly down there and see what she's got going.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Her sheet fits in. And that's the way I kind of. In my dumb Mike brain. That's how I kind of think about it, is when it's folded perfectly, it works every time. When it misfolds, it never functions the same.

[Cal]

Okay, well, plus, it's just another level of a household, too, to have more than one of those or more than One per bed.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Now we got a lot of beds now. A lot of people live in there. Okay, so keep going. So that's what that. In essence, that's a prion disease.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

In humans, we call. Is there only one prion disease in humans?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

There's Creutzfeldt Jacobs disease.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, that's it.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All right.

[Cal]

And I didn't understand that we all carry these prions currently, either.

[Mark Ruder]

Correct.

[Cal]

For whatever reason. I think that's the first time I've.

[Mark Ruder]

Heard that we all have normal. In animals as well, normal prion proteins. The functions aren't entirely known, but their fate is. Right. They recycle and they have a lifespan and they move on. And when they don't, and it's that accumulation slowly, over time, that leads to the actual disease.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Got it.

[Steven Rinella]

And in cattle, there's a prion disease called mad cow disease. In sheep, there's a prion disease called scrapie humans. Jakob Crutchfeld, was it?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

What is it? Crutchfield.

[Steven Rinella]

Jacobs crutch, always. Yeah. Screw up. Which one comes first? These are all kind of the same thing. It just manifests a certain way in cattle. Manifests a certain way in sheep. Is that a fair way to think about it?

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, it's a family. It's. It's basically a category of pathogen. Right. So we think, you know, normally more commonly about bacteria or a virus or a fungus or a parasite. So the prions are sort of in this umbrella category known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or tse. Transmissible, meaning, you know, moving from one animal to the other. Spongiform gets at what we just talked about with those prions accumulating, kind of creating holes, more or less in the brain. Encephalopathy just means disease of the brain.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

And so cattle, bse, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, scrapies, CJD in humans. One of the earlier described was Kuru in Papua New Guinea. Some ritualistic cannibalism that led to, in humans, you know, a prion disease. There's transmissible mink encephalopathy. So there's.

[Steven Rinella]

There's others with minks.

[Mark Ruder]

So there's. There's others, but they all kind of share similar traits. The one that makes CWD so wicked is that it's shed and passes from animal to animal efficiently. So scrapy does as well. Those two kind of set apart as far as uniqueness among some of the TSEs.

[Cal]

And Scrapy is preventable through a vaccine, right?

[Mark Ruder]

Not a vaccine. It's really through. So one thing. Scraping. Scraping. CWD share some similarities relative to, you know, like I just said, that the prions actually leave the animal's body and can transmit to one another. There's environmental components, so animals can get infected from the environment or they can get infected from their buddies. But one thing that. That scrapey had sort of that. That led to some effective management for the domestic livestock industry is that genetically, there are some. Some different genotypes of sheep related to that. You know, the prion protein that I mentioned. Well, that prion protein is encoded by a gene, and so there's a. There's a particular genotype in. In domestic sheep that they're. They're pretty resistant, very resistant to CW or to. To scrapey. And so through intensive, you know, breeding management in domestic sheep and then culling of everybody else, they've been able to get on top of it. And so that's a tool that scrapey has that we don't. We don't have access to deer. Got it.

[Cal]

I didn't. I didn't realize that. I do know that the culling part of that in the domestic world is severe. There's no. Nobody gets left behind.

[Steven Rinella]

And when we talk about chronic wasting disease, we're talking about one of these prion diseases that afflicts members of the deer family.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So servants deer, whitetail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, caribou. Servants.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Think of things that. If you're sitting there at home, think of things that have antlers and shed those antlers.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes. And It's. It's a 100% fatal disease.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. This has been. Now we're going to lay out. I want to. I want to briefly lay out what. What different. What you hear different hunters say about this situation.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It's part of why we're here.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. It was first identified in the 70s in Colorado.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

1967.

[Steven Rinella]

Was it 67?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

On a research facility.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That's right. I think it was formally described in 80. 1980, I believe.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So we found out about it. Not to say it. You know, who knows the history of it? Who knows? Did it. Did it emerge one day? Did it emerge that year and we found it? That's like an outstanding question. But it was identified on a research facility in Colorado. And as we've looked for it more. We find more of it, though. It definitely seems to spread. It's not just detection.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Fair.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

We tend to find a lot of CWD in places that have a lot of deer, which leads people. Has historically led People to say, if it's in a place that has a lot of deer, then it must not be that much of a problem, because how could it be that bad if the places that have the most deer have cwd? I'm still shooting bucks. I'm still shooting big bucks. We got some of the highest deer densities in the country. Where's the problem? And in fact, at times, people have come in early on in the. Early on in the battle against cwd, you'd have an outbreak in an area and wildlife managers would propose, well, let's try to go in and eradicate every deer in the area to stop the spread, which struck people as quite counterintuitive. Here we're talking about a disease that could potentially kill the deer, but there's a ton of them around, and the remedy is to kill them all.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

That seems odd, right? Right. So that strikes people as odd. Another thing will come in and they'll say, hey, we have this disease that's spreading from. Seems to be spreading from animal to animal. And so we're going to make it that you're not supposed to bait out on the ground because that'll make deer come together. And people might point out, I don't use bait, but I see deer together all the time.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

They have sex, they hang out, they nurse from one each other, they socialize.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

They're always saying they feed on the same tree. Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They play, grab ass, whatever. Like, they're always in contact. I don't see how me not putting. Like, I don't see how me putting bait out is. Is making deer socialize. When I've been watching deer my whole life and they socialize, so what's the big deal? Another thing guys might come and say. And again, this is all stuff from like, well, meaning people that love deer. Guys might come and say they're. They're advising me against eating deer that, that, you know, I should. No deer. No deer test negative. A deer might test not detectable. Right? Meaning you get either. If you submit, if you kill a deer and you want to be like, hey, I want to find out if it's got cwd. You don't get negative. You get not found. You get not detected. So often guys will say it tested negative, and people will point out, it didn't test negative. It tested not found. Okay? So we have no case. We have no case ever in the history of the United States of America, the world, whatever. There's no case ever where it has been shown that a human has contracted chronic Wasting disease. So people will say, why is my game agency. Why is Centers for disease control. Why are they saying, don't eat positive meat because of a health risk, but there's no demonstrative health risk.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It winds up smacking a little bit of. To people. It winds up smacking a little bit of COVID Right. Be really afraid. Be really afraid. But we don't really know what you're supposed to be. Just be afraid.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And that is the thing that strikes people is like, you keep telling me not to do it, but no one's gotten it right. Various versions of this. The annoyances around baiting restrictions, the idea that we're going to cull or eradicate deer in certain areas. The restriction, like, you're not supposed to bait. You can't put bait down anymore. Has, in my view, has turned people a lot where they don't want to hear about research anymore. They just want to say it's all bullshit.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. To bring Covid back. I'm about done setting this whole thing up, But I'm just trying to tell you, like, to bring Covid back would be. There was a thing. People were getting sick. People were dying of COVID 19. At the same time, people were like, oh, if someone brings a box to your house, don't touch the box. Your kids can't go to school. You can't fly in an airplane. Your business needs to go out of business.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

You need to change your behavior.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, right. And then in the end, people are like, man, I'm not going to listen to anything anybody says. I'm just fed up.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep, I'm done.

[Steven Rinella]

And then they're done.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

We've hit a I In my. This is my view. I in my view, we've hit a dangerous spot around conversations around chronic wasting disease. Because we've had a lot of guys are like, hit the done phase. They're done. And I don't think we should be done.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, we should be asking questions and looking at what's going to happen. Because I think that this conversation. The conversations about this could be very different in 20 years. A lot of people aren't aware of how much they spend each month. Like, how much of their money they're spending each month. They're not aware. Okay. Do you know how many subscriptions you pay for? What about how much you spend on takeout or delivery? It's probably more than you think. I bet you anything is more than you think. But there's an app designed to help you manage your money better. It's called Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. If you've got a goal you'd like to save for, Rocket Money can analyze your accounts to find the best time each month to put extra money aside. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you. The app automatically scans your bills to find opportunities to save and then goes to work to get you better deals. They'll even talk to customer service so you don't have to Rocket Money's 5 million members have saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, with members saving up to $740 a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.com Meater today that's RocketMoney.com Meater RocketMoney.com Meater you can make a difference in someone's life, including your own, with a job in home care. These jobs offer flexible schedules, health care, retirement options, and free training. They also provide paid time off and opportunities for overtime.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

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[Cal]

I I think it would be worthwhile to kind of dissect the done like.

[Steven Rinella]

What done looks like. Yeah.

[Cal]

Well because there's as with everything, there's people who get there through for a bunch of different reasons. Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like self like like selfish reasons.

[Cal]

Yeah. There's like the the what we talk about in hunting all the time which is like the the heritage part. It's like well, Grandpa managed whitetails this way. Grandpa was awesome. How could anything he do be wrong? And that offends me personally. We can't change. There's the I don't care what anybody says. I just want big bucks. This is the way that we get big bucks. And then there's the vein of folks who are like, well, what's the bigger crime here? Eating CWD meat or throwing it away? Right. And there's people who are like, this is my. My time in the deer woods, and the meat is a huge part of it. And they struggle. And I run into these people a lot. They really struggle with having to face that decision. So instead of facing that decision, they just go full ignorance. They're like, I will not get this thing tested because I don't want to face that decision.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Cal]

And notify me if things change.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

All of that that you just brought up as context is what Mark and I have been talking about for weeks and is largely why we're here sitting with you, is to have that conversation. Because as researchers, we look at CWD through a certain lens. As a deer hunter, I look at CWD through an entirely different lens. I understand the frustration that you just mentioned, Cal. And then I have to. I have to step back and realize that one thing we're seeing with CWD is it doesn't function the same across the landscape. It can affect certain populations differently. We are also seeing that you. It takes. This disease has a long incubation period, and it takes decades to run its course. Not months or years. Decades.

[Steven Rinella]

And so you mean within a population?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Within a population.

[Steven Rinella]

Not within an animal, but within a population.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Within a population, yeah. So within. At the animal level, you're talking, you know, 18 to 24 months for this disease to progress. And at the population level, you're talking decades for the population to. So in it. In essence, kind of think about it like this. You have these two axes on a graph. On the bottom, you have time, you have years, and on the vertical axis, you have prevalence.

[Mark Ruder]

Right.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And what you're seeing is that in. In low prevalence, a population can literally trend through time at 1% prevalence, almost undetectable for years, and then it slowly starts to increase in prevalence. And when I say slow, I'm talking a decade to go from 1 to 2%.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And then 2 to 3% and then to 5% and then to 20%. And. And you start seeing this exponential increase in prevalence rates, and we don't know at what point.

[Steven Rinella]

Give me, like, a place. Give me a place in the country where we could be talking about where like, 1% for a decade.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So.

[Cal]

And then there. But you said there is, like, a takeoff point.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. So what. So what Mark and I run into is we do research like this Arkansas study. We just Finished. And you don't know when you start the study where you are on the curve.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so you have prevalence data. So in other words, as we can talk about, you know, an agency collects prevalence data and they. Let's say they think they're at 5% prevalence. Well, then they start expanding testing, and they realize, yeah, we are at 5, or maybe we're at 15, or maybe we're at 20. And then you have other situations where you have, we think we're at 20 and we're at 35 or 40. And then you have other situations where you have a single detection. And then after lots and lots of testing in that area, you have two or three or five animals that are positive. So the disease is functioning differently across the landscape. And so that creates confusion and frustration and uncertainty because this disease, as Mark explained, didn't read the book on how to be a disease. So that creates a lot of uncertainty. And so when we go. Does design these field studies trying to get information to assist agencies with their decision making, we don't really know where we are on that curve. And once we. We think we figure out where we are sometimes, you know, some of the. Some of the work that's coming out now, Arkansas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, they're seeing that they. They're at a different point along this curve than they believe they were when the research project started, which is what we saw in Arkansas. We. We thought we were at a point, and in reality we were much farther up the curve to where prevalence was extremely high. And that just speaks to the. The complexity of the disease.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah. Just to follow up on a couple things, I think, I think at the root of so much confusion relative to CWD is adjusting our time scale.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

Right. So hemorrhagic disease, for instance. There's not a deer hunter who doesn't fear hemorrhagic disease. You know, messing up a season. Right. And it sweeping through. And that's actively happening right now.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So like, just for.

[Steven Rinella]

Just for people that know some terms, you might hear ehd. You might hear blue tongue.

[Mark Ruder]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Which comes in and just wham.

[Mark Ruder]

Yes, it comes in. It's a flood, a quick one. Right. You can go from 0 to 60 in the span of weeks. Right. And you'll have. It's very visible, it's explosive. It's clustered. So you see death, you smell death. It's everywhere. Right. It's very jarring, very alarming. And so, you know, and I've spent a long time studying that disease, and it's you know, it's. It's. It's got a lot of sort of. It'll grab your attention really quick. Right. It's very concerning cwd, and it's. And it's all boom, right? It's. It's in. It's in a matter of weeks or months. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Dead deer floating in ponds.

[Mark Ruder]

Exactly, exactly.

[Steven Rinella]

People finding huge bucks they didn't know were around.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah. You're wondering about how do I deal with all these carcasses are starting to smell bad. Right. Flip that to cwd. It's completely opposite. There's multiple examples in the country of it hiding in plain sight, not for years, but for decades. Right. It's cryptic on the landscape. You don't see it until you see it. And so when I think about cwd, I think about it in individuals, and I think about it in populations. At the individual level, you know, we're talking about. We think of it in terms of months and years, not days and weeks like we would hemorrhagic disease. So months and years for an individual, but like Mike said, for a population, we think in terms of years and decades.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

And so it's that slow, cryptic nature of the disease that just. I think that is the root of so many challenges for people to wrap their heads around in terms of, you know, do we need to care about it? Why do I need to care about it? I'm not seeing anything on the landscape. Hemorrhagic disease just stacked up a bunch of bodies in my property. Cwd, I don't see anything.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Meaning some guy turns in a deer for testing. First time in his county, there's a deer that's positive in his county. Wildlife managers then like, good Lord, let's rewrite the rule book. And people at home, deer hunters at home are like, I just don't see the issue. Right. That that might be a thing that they come away with because they're like, I don't get it. I saw all kinds of deer.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And I can't seems. But I'm having great hunting. Why, is there a problem?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right. I can't speak for a state agency, but. But Mark and I can both. You know, state agencies take a very. Most state agencies take a fairly scripted approach to. To dealing with cwd. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to reduce transmission rates amongst individuals. They're trying to prevent the transport of the disease outside of the immediate local area. Because what we do know with CWD is it starts out as a focal spot on the landscape, and then it slowly spreads outward from that spot. And so what agencies are trying to do, you'll. You'll see common responses be the creation of a CWD management zone. Right. So they'll delineate an area, a geographic area, and they'll create restrictions on import and export of carcasses or parts of carcasses. They will ban sometimes, you know, ban or alter how feed is applied to the landscape.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Cal]

Baiting bands.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep. They'll often liberalize dog. Exactly. And remove antler point restrictions and things like that. Because what they're doing, and here's like.

[Cal]

One of those major friction points, is like, the state is actively working against the quality of my personal deer hunting.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. And what. What. So what's at play there? And I get it. As a deer hunter, I totally get that. But you have to look at it through their lens. They are publicly, by law, charged with managing for conservation and sustainability of the species of wildlife in their state. And so they're dealt this gut punch of being told, you have this disease on your landscape. They have two approaches. They could be nihilistic and just say, I'm not doing anything. Or they could take this approach that we don't know where we are on the curve. So we're going to create this zone. We're going to expand our surveillance and testing, and meanwhile, we're going to try to reduce transmission. Right. We know that deer are licking each other, and we know that they're feeding under the same tree and all of that. But what, for instance, what band. What feeding is doing is putting animals at the same spot on the landscape repeatedly and therefore changing how the prion can. Can get into the environment and then remain in the environment. So an animal coming to a feeder every day and eating at that feeder every day is very different from a prion accumulation standpoint than if he's walking around in a food plot or going under an oak tree and the acorns are there. He's around other deer for a couple of weeks and then he's gone. That's not the way a feeder functions. So that's what the agencies. I'm not. I'm not trying to justify their actions. I'm simply explaining that that's the logic is that, let's put this.

[Steven Rinella]

Pulls more deer from farther away and puts them on the same, like, literally the same square foot of ground.

[Mark Ruder]

You're mixing social groups that normally wouldn't have those interactions.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And that has been shown that, you know, you. You will bring multiple social groups. Think about does, for instance, matriarchal family groups. You will bring multiple family groups to the same location and otherwise would not be there at that time.

[Cal]

The one of the issues is like, just like, how I personally contextualize these things. And when we talked about, like, prions are on the landscape forever, you can't get rid of them. My visual, my mental visual, right, is like that little tiny sucker or group of them is sitting there on the tip of that for grass forever. And then I saw some buddy produced something that showed like, how those prions eventually, like, work their. Their way down into the soil to where they're. They're just effectively not able to come in contact with any sort of a grazer, right? Which makes like, it rains, there's dew in the morning, it starts, like, working its way down into the soil. And that, to me, was one of those really like, boy, you're kind of stupid for not having thought about this yourself moments, right? But that is how you kind of think about these things on first glance, right? It's like, oh, it's there forever. Which means then what's the point in controlling this?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, right.

[Mark Ruder]

I wanted to revisit one of the things you said, Cal, about sort of the disruption that CWD has once it's detected in an area to someone's here and now opportunity. Right. And I think a lot of those, those, you know, common actions that an agency takes, it does. It seems restrictive. It's how CWD has kind of become vilified in some ways. But really, those. Those actions target trying to lower the risk of other deer getting cwd. So again, timescale, it's got to adjust it. Those actions are there for the now, but they're also for the future, to Mike's point, about stewardship and sustainability of the population. Because we've got these examples now of when we're at the end of that curve, like when we're way toward decades down the road, we. We have glimpses into what that picture looks like. And so a lot of those actions are trying to prevent or slow the movement in time along this sort of what phase of disease is the population at?

[Steven Rinella]

I desperately want to get into what you guys found when you did your work in Arkansas, but I want just a little more. We're very heavy on front loading here, so apologies, but has it ever been demonstrated. This is a huge question. Apologies. Have any of these early detection restrictions, has any of them ever been demonstrated to be effective? Yeah, you want to talk Is that yes, they have or yes, you understand the Question I do that.

[Cal]

I think that I do is to both as well as the.

[Mark Ruder]

Huh, okay. Yeah, that's, it's, that's challenging. Right. Because that's a big desire among many. Right. And we often will sort of isolate one. Right. We'll isolate, you know, carcass movement or we'll isolate baiting restrictions or feeding restrictions or fawn rehabilitation or removal of aprs or whatever. You know, it's sort of the a la carte menu of options for. These are the tools we got in the toolbox. The challenge with evaluate, evaluating one at a time is that's not how they've really deployed.

[Steven Rinella]

When you apply it, let's say, I'm saying does applying the whole toolbox. I don't mean to carve out what restriction was effective. Have we ever had a situation where there was a detection of the disease of a novel detection, so a detection of the disease in a, in a place that had been previously unknown, the toolbox is applied and then lo and behold, we never get another detection. Yeah, there was New York, or is it always, it's just full blast ahead?

[Mark Ruder]

No, it's not always there. There are successes. Right. So there's, you know, there's, you also have to kind of reframe the version of success too. Like the best example of success would be New York, right. Where they, they had a detection. There was a captive facility involved. There was depopulation of those facilities and aggressive, you know, removal of deer in a, in a tight radius around that area that was sustained for several years. And they did not have another detection, despite having detections not only inside the fence, but also in, in wild deer outside the fence.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's kind of, you're, that's reminding me, I'm familiar with that story.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So they caught it early. They caught it early enough as that epicenter was growing that that focal area was small enough around that captive facility that they could catch it in time. And with that intensive culling around that facility, they caught the spread before it had gotten too far. Which is what we're finding in a lot of our wild populations. By the time an animal is detected as being positive, the follow up surveillance is showing that it's more widespread and more prevalent in some situations in that situation. To Mark's point, that is incredibly challenging to try to manage that disease when you realize that you're farther along that curve than you thought you were.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, like you get a county, I keep talking about county level, but a county, say a county and I don't know, pick A state, a county in Missouri gets its first ever CWD hit from a hunter submitted deer. That's the first. But then you're saying, then they'll come in and be like, okay, let's go test a thousand deer. And they test a thousand deer. And they're like, well, there's 50, there's 50 positives. So they didn't catch the first deer.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It had been there for some time.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like, yeah, point. You're like, is it the first? And they're like, oh, no, it's not the first. This has obviously been here. We just never caught it. We weren't looking. And now that we're looking, it's all over the damn place.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It's too late to, it's too late to isolate that little square mile that's Right. Of ground.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, yeah. So it changes the options, right. If you, because that's, you know, if, if you have, if you have, say, robust surveillance in a state and you really have some confidence that, like, this might not be the first, but maybe it's really early. Right. That, that could, that could sort of justify some pretty severe aggression to try to like, okay, if we got a chance, let's try to stamp this out into that. To that point, to your, your victory point earlier. You know, there are examples. Minnesota, like a, you know, within a state, sometimes we get, we get focused on the state. But, but there are victories within states too. Right. So you might have an endemic region in a state or an area that has CWD established and you get a spark somewhere else.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

You.

[Mark Ruder]

And through, you know, it's early. Through aggressive action, they kind of stamp it out and there's no new cases. Right. And so that shouldn't be lost, I think, in terms of, of victory. Even within an unaffected region of a state. States are big areas and the disease moves slowly. So as long as we can be aggressive on those outliers, you know, that will save, you know, it will reset the timescale of this disease in those areas. Right. Then we're not marching up that path. We're kind of starting over again and waiting till the next one. As far as other successes, that's where it gets a little bit more challenging with some of these regulations in areas where CWD is established, it's about living with cwd, Right. And so our goals might be different. You know, some agencies are controlling. You'll hear the term managing for prevalence. Right. So basically these actions are just trying to keep that prevalence down to the, to that like as, as Mike was talking about. Earlier, like, you know, 1% to 5%, you know, trying to prevent it from increasing sort of exponentially up that slope. The more you can keep it suppressed down the. The more you suppress the. The very negative consequences at the population level. Right. And so a lot of agencies are doing that. That's a hard. That's a hard, like, happy pill to swallow sometimes. Right. It's like we're sort of redefining what success means when we're talking about success.

[Steven Rinella]

Is no longer putting it back in the bottle.

[Mark Ruder]

No, no, no.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, that's a hard one to swallow. As a deer hunter, I think about it like this, okay, so the agency is telling me I have to behave differently. Why are they doing that? To Mark's point, they're trying. If the prevalence is low, they're trying to keep it low because a deer that contracts CWD is going to die. And so that is an animal that is not as we're going to talk about. They're not going to have the same reproductive potential as other deer. They're going to have lower survival. They are not going to contribute to the population in the same way as a CWD negative animal. And therefore they're not part of that surplus, that harvestable surplus moving forward, particularly if they contract the disease when they're young. And so what the agencies are trying to do is keep CWD from not being a relevant form of mortality, if that makes sense. They're trying to keep it to where it's really not relevant at a population scale. And if they, if they can do that, then that is in many ways a successful. Like Steve, to your point, you're not putting it back in the bottle, but what you're doing is you're minimizing the impacts of the disease at a population scale so that you don't go to where some of these populations are going, which is there is no more harvestable surplus. The disease has affected the population in a way. The prevalence has gotten so high that there is no more surplus there.

[Cal]

Deer, meaning any hunter harvest is going to have a population level effect.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

You start getting to a point where harvest is truly additive. Like, you have such a significant percentage of animals that are dying solely from CWD that when you start tacking on harvest and predation and these things that just affect deer populations, you've changed. You've tipped the pendulum to the point where the lens doesn't look at all like it looked if the prevalence was 2%. When you get to 20% or 30% or even higher, as we see in Some populations, that's what the agencies are trying to do is keep it low enough to where it's not relevant.

[Mark Ruder]

And that's scary, what Mike is outlining there. But I think it's really important for listeners to understand that that can happen at the same time, even in the same state, in different areas as record harvest. You know, everything you would want as a deer hunter is available to you in one area and then in another. That's. It's this focal nature of these very severe impacts and that slow sort of expansion over time. And that's where it's like that, that can happen, you know, in the same state or in the same general area for a long time where you have great opportunity, great abundance, sort of juxtaposed with this other scenario. It's hard to. I think that that's challenging for people because unless you've been on the ground and you see sort of some of the stuff Mike's talking about, you're on the landscape and you see some of these, these population level impacts of cwd, you just hear about them. It's different from seeing it, you know, and experiencing it. And so I think that's a challenge for people because, you know, you harvest the buck and it tests positive. It was, you know, it was a healthy, fat, you know, totally normal looking deer. That's your experience as a hunter with cwd, the real experience. You hear all this stuff, but then your real experience was that was a great looking deer.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And to calm down, what is all.

[Mark Ruder]

This noise about cwd and to Cal's.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Point, now I have to, I have to discard that deer, right? Yeah. That's extremely frustrating and it causes confusion. Yeah.

[Cal]

I shot a doe at Doug Duran's place that you were just like, like people stopped and looked at it and they were like, that is a damn good looking animal. Right. You're just like, she's mature and, and just big and healthy and always. And she tested positive.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Cal]

For cwd. And that was just a gut punch.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

You know, and what Doug is experiencing, I spoke with Doug prior to coming here and what he's experiencing is very comparable to what's going on in northwest Arkansas where you've got parts of the landscape where, to Mark's Point, where you're in these focal centers and, and you flip a coin and every other deer is testing positive, or more particularly for bucks, and then in the next county over, they're testing positive and the prevalence is lower, but the pendulum hasn't swung far enough to start seeing these population level consequences. You still see deer, you still harvest deer. They're not all positive. And so the chatter at the local feed store is different from this county to this county because it's taken 30 years for this disease to get to where the snapshot that we as human beings are seeing right now, today, and we can't. I suck at this. I think about today and tomorrow. That's just the way I'm wired. It's hard for me to think about 20 years from now, what, you know, what's my camp in Louisiana going to look like 20 years from now versus today, what's a client's property going to look like 30 years from now? Now the prevalence on, you know, in that area that he manages that property is 1%. Well, what's it going to look like in 30 years if. If we just throw our hands up and do nothing versus if we try to minimize transmission potential and try to do these things that logically would impact prion accumulation in the environment? That's hard to conceptualize and wrap your head around. 30 years from now or 50 years from now.

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[Cal]

Tyler redick here from 23:11.

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[Cal]

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[Steven Rinella]

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[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But all of a sudden they were like the way you'd look at a rat. Like, ah, get that thing out of here.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, shoot.

[Steven Rinella]

Like shoot the deer. There's a deer in the yard. Right. Before we all get sick like that, it would just that what a deer stands for would change from a human safety standpoint that, that haunts me and, and my own, the, the diet that my family eats.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Sure. Which is like me too.

[Steven Rinella]

Like the, the bulk of the protein we take in is from servants.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It'd be devastating. It'd be heartbreaking. I've looked at it like that. Doug looks at it one, just animal welfare, meaning, you know, he grew up with a farm background. Sick animals equals no good. Okay. So he just instinctively doesn't like the thought of sick animals. Loves deer, doesn't like the thought of sick deer. So that turns him off to. He's often said we will get to a point and he reads more and studies more than I do. We will get to a point where this does impact deer hunting. He feels we'll get to a point where we don't see big bucks anymore. And it used to be kind of like I felt like it was like he was predicting or prophesizing or trying to crystal ball it right. But that's like two different things. And I think there's probably a lot of people that hold both those at the same time where they're like very concerned with food safety and then very concerned down the road of are we going to have big whitetails? Yeah, like are we still going to be able to grow seven year old bucks?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I also think part of Doug's frustration is what I see with, with private landowners all over the south is that they, they buy these recreational properties. They put so much of themselves and their resources into creating this recreational opportunity for them and their families. They want their kids and their grandkids to come experience and to have this legacy of, and have it all written out and they've got this grand plan. I'm envisioning one of my clients at 72, he has his like exactly what he's wanted forever. He finally worked his ass off enough to be able to afford this property, to put the resources on it. He hires a biologist, he does these things and his deer herd is terrific. And the thought of that being undermined by this disease is something that causes him incredible frustration and angst. And then having clients that own properties in CWD zones, that is what they tell me. They're like. I, I'm having a hard time thinking through what the future is going to look like because I'm 60 and I want my grandkids. You know, I have two new grandsons and this is theirs. This is. I've been working all these years to create this opportunity for them so that I can facilitate the next generation of hunters and land managers and conservationists. And now you're telling me that there's a chance that could be undermined by this disease and that is incredibly frustrating and upsetting for them. That's what I hear. Not so much the food, although that is incredibly frustrating, is the legacy, the property legacy, the generational impact that this disease could have on land management, on land value, on the deer hunting fraternity. That's what I hear with the conversations that I have.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so is the guy that's worried, how warranted is someone who's worried about the future big buck potential in their area?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, there's no question like what we're seeing with these, with the research that is occurring in populations with high prevalence, the age structure which Doug is seeing in his area as well, the age structure is getting progressively younger, meaning that you're just not, you're not carrying older males over into the five and six year old age class. And so I know we're going to talk about Arkansas.

[Steven Rinella]

But yeah, let's talk about Arkansas.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So what we found in Arkansas, which we'll circle back to, but you know, we found that 50% of all 2 1/2 year old males tested positive, more than 50% of 3 1/2 year old males. And so if you look across the south, a lot of the buck harvest is comprised of three and a half year old males. So if you're in a, you know, you think about this population in Arkansas, super high prevalence, which we'll talk about, most of your bucks by the time they're three have the disease, well over 60% have the disease when they're four. And if half of them have it at two, they're not surviving past four. And so, you know, I'm thinking.

[Cal]

And that that timeline is so crucial to these arguments as well. Right. It's like.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure, because he's a jumbo at five or six.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, I mean in my world, working with landowners, you know, we're not, we're not harvesting at least southern whitetails. We're not, we're not harvesting many of our bucks until they're at least four and most were going to five. And so in that vein, you know, under that scenario I just described, which is on the ground and in northwest Arkansas, you're not going to have five and six year old bucks.

[Cal]

Well, I guess I bring up that timeline too because you do hear in certain areas of the country they're like, well, who cares? Our deer don't live till six anyway.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right, right, right.

[Cal]

And so if they're, if they're showing signs of the disease at 6, what is it again to me, like why is this a backyard issue to me and how I hunt and manage deer? Right. But you're saying that in it progresses to where, when, by the time they're showing signs of the disease, that, that gets younger.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Cal]

As well. Right.

[Mark Ruder]

Another thing is the farther we keep talking about that time scale. Right. And the farther down that path you get and sort of the percentage of animals infected in the population is as that increases, the age at which those animals get infected tends to be earlier in life. And I was just talking with Mike about this this morning. There's a particular spot in the Arkansas study site where the prevalence is very high. We suspect it's been on the landscape for the longest. And we've got, you know, all these collared deer. We, you know, we investigated the, you know, the death site, you know, full field necropsies, lots of photos, you know, sent back, lots of laboratory analysis. To sort of understand why these deer died. Individual causes of death. So there's a. There's a particular buck that was. That was captured in this area. He was. It was about eight or nine months at the time of capture. Just as kind of a normal, average looking body weight. Did a rectal biopsy. He was. So this is a common diagnostic test that you could use for cwd. You take a little snip of. Sounds kind of weird, but like, of the rectal. Like tissue. It was positive. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And so how'd you get this deer in your hands? Tranquilize it.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. So let. You want.

[Cal]

Oh, so this.

[Mark Ruder]

We'll revisit it later.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Let's cover this.

[Mark Ruder]

I'll come back to that.

[Cal]

Yeah, yeah, that's a big deal.

[Mark Ruder]

I'll come back to the end of his life.

[Cal]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, yeah. So what we did in Arkansas is. So Arkansas Game and Fish Commission first detected CWD in 2015 in an elk. They subsequently detected it in a whitetail in 2016.

[Steven Rinella]

The farm elk?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

No, this was a wild oak.

[Steven Rinella]

Wild oak. Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so they, as an agency, decided to submit an RFP request for proposals a few years later to solicit proposals from researchers to try to understand. As soon as they started testing Once these two positives occurred, they realized their prevalence was well over 20%. And so.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's from hunter submissions.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so suddenly they went, oh, wow, we need to understand where we're at, what's going on.

[Steven Rinella]

So they found one, started testing promptly, started taking a lot of samples.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

People turn in their deer head.

[Mark Ruder]

Some of it was agency collection too. In that initial response, their goal was to shoot. They basically. So they had that positive elk and they also had a positive white tailed deer that was clinically affected. And so they kind of drew big circles around these, used them together. And their, their goal was, all right, we're going to go shoot 300 deer within this area because we need to understand what we're facing anywhere in that area.

[Cal]

Is that a lot?

[Mark Ruder]

It's a lot of deer. Yeah. It had been more than they had sampled there previously. Yeah. But they didn't even get to 300 because by 260 they saw that they were facing this 20% plus prevalence. Yeah. So they're like, okay, it's about.

[Steven Rinella]

They wanted to go get an immediate snapshot.

[Mark Ruder]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And their immediate snapshot was like one in five deer.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Are positive for chronic wasting disease.

[Cal]

Yeah.

[Mark Ruder]

It was a gut punch.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. And Mark was living that. I was not involved at that time. I was Hearing about this peripherally. And then I got this email with a request saying we would like you, among others. It was sent to a number of researchers. We'd like you to consider putting together a research project. Excuse me. That would answer these relevant questions we have. And so what I did, excuse me, what I did was I reached out to Mark and colleagues at the University of Georgia. We reached out collectively to colleagues at Colorado State at the pre owned research center there. And we put together this very large five year study to try to help the agency do everything from understand abundance or deer density, prevalence rates, to look at behavior of CWD positive and negative deer, to look at, to survival and habitat use and all these things that you would get from just capturing and collaring deer. And then we designed this study plan to come back at the end and to also collect cull animals that were radio marked at the end of the study to try to figure out if their disease trend, if their disease, you know, prevalent. Oh, I'm sorry, if they're positive or negative, would change at the, you know, by the time the end of the study occurred. So what we did is we, we captured and GPS collared hundreds of deer. We, we ended up trapping them or what we would dart them, rocket net them and drop net them.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And what we were trying to do is put GPS collars on adults and we put vaginal implant transmitters in does, which are these, as you know, these transmitters that when they give birth, it kicks the transmitter out, alerts the researcher that there's fawns on the ground. We would then go in and collar the fawns at every capture. Of course, to Mark's point, which he can explain, we would take a rectal biopsy for CWD testing. We would then track these deer. We programmed the collars to have battery life over several years because we were interested in obviously studying the deer for as long a term timeframe as we could. We tried to recapture as many deer as we possibly could from year to year so that we could repeatedly test them. We set up camera arrays all over the study site. And the way this, the initial study site came to fruition is through the testing that Arkansas Game and Fish had already done. They had evidence to show that there was a progression of prevalence from higher to lower as you went from west to east. So we set our study design up to where we captured that variation. We had sampling in the highest prevalence, what appeared to be the highest prevalence, all the way to the lowest prevalence. And we captured deer and put camera arrays and did all of this work, the same across all kind of three study sites that span from high prevalence to lower prevalence, certainly not low. And we did this for four years, and then we had a fifth year where we went in and tried to collect marked animals off public lands at the same time, which Mark can talk about because he saw this with his own eyes. He, you know where deer are dying while this study is ongoing?

[Steven Rinella]

Deer with your collars on them.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes, are dying. And we're recovering those animals and we are field necropsying and beyond. We are testing them for cwd and we are seeing that this disease is becoming more prevalent right before our eyes. And so we did this. We recently provided the findings to the agency. The penultimate piece of information from this study was a population model, an integrated population model, where we took all of this data and we used it to model to tell the agency, where are you at on that curve? And more importantly, what's the future for you, given where you are on the curve? What does the next 10 years or 20 years look like for you as. As an agency relative to this population? And what we realized pretty quickly is we were, we as a, as a research group and the agency were farther along on that curve than we thought. And so as of 2025, the prevalence rate is about 50% in that part of Arkansas, about 35% for does and about 68% for bucks. So most bucks have CWD in that area. And so incredibly high prevalence, which is, that's. That's context. The listener needs to understand that CWD had been on this landscape for years before it was ever detected. And so this population had gone, quote, unquote, unmanaged, just normal harvest regulations that the state would implement. There were antler point restrictions in place trying to improve aid structure and allow animals to. To grow, to be older. And so what was occurring is for decades, prevalence was just slowly creeping up. And then suddenly an animal is detected positive because they're clinical, and the agency realizes, oh, wow, we're farther along.

[Cal]

Sorry. When you get to say clinical, are you visually is showing signs of sick.

[Steven Rinella]

Deer shows up in someone's yard or something?

[Cal]

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, and that's not something, you know, that Mark. That's something Mark and I talk about a lot is these clinical animals, you're not likely to see this. Unlike a hemorrhagic disease outbreak where you've got animals laying everywhere. As we saw with our, with our movement data, these animals, as they're becoming positive, as they're, as the disease is progressing so I'll give you a scenario. You catch a two year old buck, you put a radio collar on him and he tests positive. He looks fine. Everything. He looks great, but he tests positive. Now we're tracking his movements over the next two years as the disease progresses and he starts becoming compromised. And so what we saw is they don't behave like uninfected deer. They are less vigilant, they move differently. They will expand their home range. They. Which is interesting if you think about prion transmission. They're actually expanding their area. That puts them in contact with other animals that they may not.

[Steven Rinella]

Why are they doing that?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Don't know if they're sick. Don't know.

[Cal]

The prion wanting to spread. It's like a sci fi magazine.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It's hard to say. I mean you would. I would think that they would hunker down. Oh sure, man. But we didn't see that. We saw the opposite. That they actually expanded their home range.

[Steven Rinella]

And you sure that's not just like it's function of his age?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

No, no. I mean so we, we control for age in our. Oh.

[Steven Rinella]

Cause you got all kinds of other ones that aren't positive.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

We also saw that interestingly enough, they started interacting as they became positive. They started interacting with other deer differently. And they were much more likely to interact with another positive deer. And so they start changing because of.

[Cal]

The change in their behaviors and movements.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Maybe, maybe they're.

[Cal]

They're less likely to run with.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

They're more likely to be around another deer. Which makes sense.

[Steven Rinella]

Why does that make sense? He's sick.

[Cal]

They're letting them do the thinking. Maybe. I don't know.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I mean, I don't. I don't know. The. I mean, could it be. Could it be a combination of the change in vigilance behavior with. Hey, I don't. I'm not. Things just aren't clicking with me. So for instance, we had a. You remember that polar vortex? We had a severe weather outbreak. Was that the first year or the second year?

[Mark Ruder]

We had a couple down in Arkansas.

[Steven Rinella]

The one that froze all the woodpeckers and everything for that.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So we had positive deer that just laid down in the woods and died. Like they didn't seek refuge at all.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so there's something that.

[Cal]

Where the term stiff as a pecker.

[Steven Rinella]

Comes from, I don't know. But you know this. You remember that massive cold snap, we went down to hunt squirrels and out in the woods, I mean it was like national news. Cold.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Freezing everything to death. But out in the woods all over the place is just birds. Totally fine, except dead on the ground. Not a feather ruffled while freezing to death in the trees, falling to the ground. I mean, we like all day long.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So they're killed Clay's whole bamboo patch, something.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

You know, their behavior is becoming compromised in some way. Which makes sense.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that. That clicks. Yeah, like that it did it. That it doesn't have the wherewithal to do what it needs to stay alive, but just like increase social. Unless that somehow is attributed to its lack of vigilance or its paranoia.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And some of that, some of that we couldn't possibly understand with this resolution of this data we have. Because our vigilance data are coming from cameras from observing animals. You know, head up, head down. The spatial and interaction data are coming from GPS locations. And we know we don't have all deer marked. Right. So there's inherent bias there.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, I can tell you a sick kid is more likely to end up in his mom and dad's bed.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't know why.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

A long time since we're the exposed.

[Cal]

To that marketing communications folks for the state agency saying, like, are you sure you want to capture sick deer and then let them go again?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. So Mark and I talked about this this morning. We wanted to understand how this disease looked without intervention. Like, so we wanted to see exactly what was going on with these animals. So, yes, we were capturing animals and we were allowing this to proceed as it would.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, what would have happened if you weren't doing the study?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we, we do. We collect all this information. We see, you know, for instance, one of the more kind of concerning outcomes was the prevalence is so, so high. Another outcome that was interesting, if you look at doe survival, like annual survival of negative does, it was about 80%. Pretty high. It was 60% for positive dose.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

If you looked at buck survival, annual survival, if it was a negative cohort, it was about 70%. Pretty high. It was 40% positive animals.

[Steven Rinella]

And that is. Is above and beyond normal. Is that above and beyond just the disease killing them? Because, you know, like, like, like if you think back to like hiv, aids, Right. People that die are dying from pneumonia or they're dying from complications from other things. Right. They're. They, they. They more likely like die from the flu.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So if, if, if it takes two years to kill a deer, if the disease takes two years to kill a deerSER, then of course, from one year to the next, 50% of the deer that have it should be dead because it kills them. It's always fatal.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So. Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

So like, no, like, like of course they're dead because they have a disease that always kills them.

[Cal]

But are they, but if they get hit by a car.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. So what we did is we categorized if they, even if they were CWD positive, but they died from a car, a vehicle collision or harvest or predation, we considered that not CWD related.

[Cal]

Oh, whoa.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

Wow.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

We only categorize mortalities to CWD that had no other links. And Mark was like, it lays down and dies. Yes.

[Cal]

That's fascinating.

[Steven Rinella]

I see. And so that's what I was. Yeah, that addresses what I was getting at. Meaning he's positive and gets smoked by a car. That's maybe he's a little bit less vigilant. But how do you factor that in?

[Cal]

Right.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

So we, we were trying to be conservative in that vein to not link mortalities to CWD that had approximate, you know, some other type of sure of cause. And what we found was about 20%, just under 20% of all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. And so that's in addition to predation and harvest and these other things.

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[Cal]

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[Steven Rinella]

Have you ever tested a live deer with the. With the rectal thing you're talking about?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That's what we do.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but have you ever tested a live deer and then had it be that that deer Was still alive 25 months later?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Are you asking if you. If it tested positive at the record.

[Steven Rinella]

Have you ever had a deer test positive and then 25 months later, that deer is still running around alive?

[Mark Ruder]

I'd have to look.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I'd have to look at the data.

[Mark Ruder]

I would think that would be the. You know, that would be the exception, not the rule, but not impossible.

[Cal]

Well, this.

[Mark Ruder]

Based on the incubation period.

[Cal]

I wanted to ask this, too, because this test is pretty darn new. Right? I mean, I feel like I just was talking about this last week, and I'm like, there's not a test for CWD for live deer.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That.

[Cal]

So is there? And this was because that. It takes a while for the prions to build up to a detectable stage. Unless you're taking biopsies from the brain, brain stem, spinal column, then lymph nodes. So is the rectal test. Is that only giving you positives at a certain progression point of the disease?

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, there's. There's a lot of nuance here with the testing, but it also gets back to that time scale that I was talking about with in an individual deer. We're talking about, you know, months and years. And so a lot of that has to do with the progression of the disease, the movement of the. The abnormal prion in the body. So, you know, if a deer gets exposed to, you know, infected with cwd, the first place where we're typically going to have a detectable amount in there is in the lymph nodes. Right. And everybody's probably familiar with the retropharyngeal lymph nodes. That's part of what people will call the lymphoid system. So, like, you know, there's lymph nodes all around the body. So that little piece of the rectum that we're taking there happens to be, like, little tiny. They're not lymph nodes.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

They're little.

[Mark Ruder]

Almost like little islands of lymph lymphoid tissue. That's what we have those all throughout our. All throughout our intestinal tract. And so that's what we're grabbing there. But that's typically a little bit later in disease. So you could easily have. If we were to just Have a deer that, you know, several months, or, you know, three months, four months, five months after infection. We, we test its lymph node and we test its rectal biopsy. There'd be a decent chance that that lymph node sample is positive and that rectal biopsy is not positive. Got it. And a lot of that just has to do with the timing. The last place that it goes is going to be the brain. Right. The brain stem, the obex people will have that referred to the information superhighway for us. Right. And so that process takes a long time. That's the months and years process. Right. So you can have an animal, it's, you know, where that prion is kind of just slowly accumulating in these tissues, and it's doing normal deer stuff, and it looks totally healthy. That's why you can harvest an animal that tests positive for cwd. It's hard to say. Does that animal have cwd, the disease? Well, probably not exhibiting any signs of it yet. But he's test positives on the path to disease. Right. And so, you know, by the time. By the time you get, you know, a year, sometimes two years, sometimes, there's been experimental studies where they don't really see disease out until three, four years. So the time is. Is pretty weird sometimes.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so why do people say that CWD is always fatal? Because you start like, life always, like, life ends.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, yeah. We're all going to die. Right. Everything's fatal.

[Steven Rinella]

And so if he can have it for four years, why do people also often say that they're dead in two years?

[Mark Ruder]

I guess it's like you can predict. Okay, so if something else, you can start a clock, the deer gets cwd, test positive for cwd. It's like, I don't know when. If you evade all other causes of mortality, this is what you're gonna die from. There's very few of us that can say that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Okay, but at what point? So I'm saying, like, if he. If.

[Cal]

Yeah. The point would have to be prior to the naturally natural mortality. Mortality mark. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

So, yeah. So when they say it's always fatal, meaning if he doesn't get shot, doesn't get hit by a car, doesn't get killed by a coyote, whatever, that will be his cause of death.

[Mark Ruder]

Correct.

[Steven Rinella]

But if it could be that he carries it for four years, it almost kind of doesn't matter because most, like deer don't live that long. Do you follow me? Like, if you could, if you tested a deer, like, if you guys Go out and put. If you go out and test deer and collar them and you're like, okay, here's a positive deer, I would expect you to say, since he's already had it, he's already. Somewhere along the line, I would expect you to say that mortality, CWD mortality in and of itself is. Is 60% or 70% or certainly more than 50% because it's always fatal and it kills them within a couple years. So any deer that's already positive, the clock has already started ticking. He's already into his two years of life. So why is it not that by two years every one of them is dead?

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, well, that's part of the. You know, Mike mentioned earlier, like, this disease is just atypical. It doesn't. Read. Read the book. You know, there's not a, you know, with most infectious diseases where there's a highly predictable time course, it's a little bit unpredictable. Once you get into sort of that. When is a deer going to start to show clinical signs? Right. Usually once that happens, you know, whether it's 16 months, 18 months, 20 months, once they start to. You, if you were watching a deer and you're like, that deer's off, it's not doing. Not doing right. That course is going to be pretty quick. Probably within weeks or a couple months.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

So once they hit that point is downhill. And those, those are the deer that you can, you know, like some of those subtle changes that Mike was talking about relative to vigilance or home range size, all that stuff, that's probably even something different than we can perceive visually sometimes even. Yeah, you know, it's the classic deer everybody sees in the pictures. It's a frame stance, head droop, slobbering zombie kind of stare. Just like looking into space. Nothing. Like those deer are circling the drain. Those deer are so far down this path, a lot of them would have died earlier. I look at animals as, like wild animals as akin to professional athletes. Right. They have to be at their peak constantly to migrate, spar, evade predators, evade threats. If you're just like a little bit off, think about how many professional athletes sit on the bench when they're just. I'm just not a little bit right. You know, so that's where it gets really hard. Those other mortalities, you know, killed by a hunter, nabbed by a predator, hit by a car, whatever. You know, what role did it have in sort of sealing its fate?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Mark Ruder]

Into that. Like there is. There is something there. It's hard to quantify. There have been Studies that have shown, you know, more prone to predation, more prone to harvest, more prone to vehicle strike. There seems to be regional differences with that stuff, but certainly gives us the impression that like, this stuff matters. Right. That when you're adjusting an animal's ability to interact with its environment, perceive threats, move all these things, it's going to be more prone to an unthrifty life.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, we one time saw a coyote that must have got hit by a road going up the hill by our house, got hit by a car, but eagles were killing them. So did eagles kill him? Right.

[Mark Ruder]

This is tricky.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And your question is he's just dragging.

[Steven Rinella]

Himself along and they're just like taking advantage of the situation. So yeah, it's hard to sort it out.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But I'm just trying to get to, again, I'm trying to get from the perspective of someone looking at someone looking at it and saying like, like if, if I took a human, like you take a, an American male, like, okay, if he doesn't die of, you know, he doesn't die of an opioid overdose, if he doesn't die in a vehicular car accident, if he doesn't die from lung cancer, he will die from heart disease. Right. It's always fatal, like, because like, of course something will end up getting you. And if you take all the other things that kill and set it aside, it's like, of course it'll be heart disease.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

But I think that, I think the point that that argument misses is that these animals on average are not living as long as non diseased animals. Therefore their net reproductive potential is less than negative animals. And therefore you factor in that, that reduced lifespan. That's the answer to that question from my perspective is these animals are not going to live as long on average as a negative animal. And therefore the consequences to the population are going to be.

[Cal]

Yeah, get along that curve. You go from a population that on average you could take like one of those crazy Maryland deer. Remember learning about, well, the, the whitetails on like the, all the weird government ground in Maryland. You know, they have like ancient whitetail. Does that live to regularly, like 16 or whatever.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, I don't know about this.

[Cal]

Yeah, but like on average the population starts as like they live to 8 years old and then a decade goes by and it's like, well, it's seven and a half. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, on average everybody lives till five. On average everybody lives till three and a half.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Cal]

And then you got serious problems because and that's. You're not producing deer.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That's why the agencies are trying to keep that prevalence so low, is because at a low prevalence, these. This discussion that we're having about, you know, mortality causes, it becomes largely irrelevant because only a tiny percentage of animals have the disease to begin with, and therefore an even smaller percentage of that are dying, specifically just from cwd.

[Cal]

You're killing big bucks. People are getting food to eat.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

But as you get up closer, farther up that curve, then this conversation becomes more relevant because now you're losing a significant percentage of your population to just the disease. And so if we looked at of all the positive deer that we put our hands on, a third of them died just from CWD. So about 20% of the total population was impacted, but a third of the animals that were positive died solely from cwd. And so, again, that's why, because prevalence.

[Steven Rinella]

Rates are so high, you're losing 20% of the population to the disease. Strictly to the disease.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes.

[Steven Rinella]

And harvest wouldn't even be that high, would it? Hunter harvest is.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It was so the most impactful. You know, from a. From a population perspective, you had three competing mortality sources. You had harvest, predation, and cwd.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Whereas in a normal population, you would have harvest and predation.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Okay. Right. And so you're adding this mortality source that's becoming increasingly more relevant as prevalence increases. And so, not surprisingly, the final product that we produced with this. With this study was this population model. And what we. What we showed clearly, is this population is declining about 13 to 14% per year.

[Steven Rinella]

Hmm.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so now you're looking at deer densities that are in the one to five deer per square mile range from.

[Steven Rinella]

A high of what?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, we came in at a. We only have a snapshot. Right. We.

[Steven Rinella]

We came in and because you don't trust other. You can't trust other other guesses.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, you don't know where. I mean, we don't know 20 years ago. What the. I mean, we come in as researchers, and we get a snapshot of where we are right now. And that's another problem with this, with it, with trying to understand this disease. It's kind of like the other analogy I have is kind of like wild turkey declines. I mean, you're coming in and you're trying to study something that's been occurring in the south over 25 years, and you come in and you. You get a little snapshot of data from a population, and then now you're trying to figure out from a snapshot what the Bigger picture is, and we're dealing, you know, you're talking about a disease that takes decades to, to kind of operate. And we come in and a five year study is a pretty long field study in my world. And even in that's not near enough. I would have loved to have had 15 years of data before and I'd like to keep studying the population, but that's just not, that's just not realistic.

[Mark Ruder]

But.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so we show clearly that this population is declining and it's going to continue to decline. And now you have prevalence that you know is exceeding, you know, is at 50% across the population, which is incredibly high. And now you start thinking through scenarios of what, what does the agency do?

[Mark Ruder]

Right.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And so back to where kind of where we started. When the agency detected this disease, they took a fairly standard approach. Let's create a zone, let's increase harvest or opportunity, let's liberalize bag limits, let's remove antler point restrictions, let's ban feeding. And what they're trying to do is control the spread of the disease, but they didn't know where they were on the curve.

[Steven Rinella]

So now that they know it's too late to do that and they know that the population's declining, at what point do they reverse strategy?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I think that speaks to the complexity of this disease in some situations, and this is certainly not doom and gloomy, but when you get to prevalence as high as what you see in northwest Arkansas, your management options have changed from where you are. If you're at 2% prevalence at 2 or 3 or on the low end of the curve, you have these options. Mark and I've talked about, when you get up to 50%, now your options are limited because now your population is declining and now you're thinking about the future sustainability of the population.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's what. Yeah. So if you go to a place that has 30, 40, 50% prevalency, you're not going to shoot your way out of it.

[Mark Ruder]

No, no. Because you're not going to get rid of the disease.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It's there.

[Mark Ruder]

The version of living with it.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

At that prevalence, it's there. And so you're.

[Steven Rinella]

Would you, is there an argument that you'd want more deer on the landscape to have a higher amount of deer and test more, that you'd have some sort of natural selection play out? Do you have more deer, more genetic diversity and you'd start some new strategy of seeing who's resistant?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Did one. Were you asked this at that hearing?

[Mark Ruder]

You know, there's, there's yeah, the deer there are. It's basically trying to establish a new normal.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, Right.

[Mark Ruder]

It's trying to. The theory with CWD is that you're eventually going to hit some equilibrium right. Where you have, your prevalence is so high, that percentage of deer that are positive is so high and you have this continual, you know, sort of, you know, the clock ticks and deer die, but you still have recruitment into the population. And so you really can't. At some point you'll have that percentage of positive deer is going to kind.

[Cal]

Of like, yeah, because if it's good habitat, right. Like it's going to suck in other deer who are like, oh, there's not deer here, lots of food around.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah. And there is that. There are studies ongoing and this is like real world mother nature experiments right now. Like trying to look at these populations that are at this state and start to understand genetics. Like, what is that equilibrium? What's the new balance? Is there shifting of like we talked about that prion gene, the PRNP gene. That's kind of a metric that some places will use to sort of monitor how a population is maybe shifting based on a new selection pressure. Right. Like this is a relatively new selection pressure for most populations. And so all that work is sort of, you know, ongoing. I think we're a little bit down the road from, from understanding it, but it's a very important area to sort of understand is what, what do we expect from these populations once they get to that point. I do want to circle back to one thing. We were talking about dead deer, because that's my jam. So yeah, like say a buck, you can definitely have a scenario where, okay, he, he first tests, you know, he gets infected at two and a half. Okay, yeah, he'll live to four and a half and you know, honky dory, everything's great, you know. But I'll go back to that original story I was talking about with one of our collared deer in sort of the hot zone where we are. And I, I do this not to like, I fear that sometimes this is the kind of stories that, you know, you get accused of fear mongering, but.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm very sensitive to that.

[Mark Ruder]

I'll tell you, it's really not, you know, because like I just said, you can also have a scenario where you harvest the four and a half year old buck. Right. Gets to these ages that are desirable, but the opposite is also true. And we know that as prevalence increases in a population that percent increases, you get to this point where the age at which you're infected early in an infection cycle. It's usually like the males are at greater risk of becoming infected. Older males are more likely of being testing positive. But as it becomes a highly endemic area. So you've had prions shed into the environment, into that habitat for many years. Lots of direct contact between animals. The age of like the, there's accumulation of risk. Right. Your chances once you are born of encountering CWD are greatly increased.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Mark Ruder]

If you're born into that environment, chances are you're going to see CWD sooner rather than later. And so to that point, you know, there was a buck that was captured in 2022. He was about 8 or 9 months old at the time of capture. Relatively normal body condition. Wasn't thin, wasn't, you know, super chunky. Just kind of, kind of average. We got the rectal biopsy and that's not an immediate test. Right. Months go by before we get that answer. Ended up testing positive. So that was in March. Okay. We got a mortality signal in September.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Mark Ruder]

He was dead along the Buffalo river, right on the shoreline. And to say emaciated is kind of an understatement. You know, this is a 1.5 year old deer at this point, died of chronic wasting disease. He was completely wasted away. I can show you guys picture later. No muscle mass, no subcutaneous fat, no visceral fat. Fat inside, you know, and he had aspiration pneumonia, which is a common problem you see in end stage clinical cwd. You know, as, as you, as this disease begins to affect pretty much everything, right? Because it's, it's, it's filling up the space in that brainstem, like your information superhighway for your body. They lose control of their reflexes, right? So their swallowing reflex goes away, so they aspirate, feed, and then that settles down into the lungs. So he had aspiration pneumonia and he had an old injury on his foot, which a necropsy. A lot of deer and an old injury on the foot. Deer do fine for a long time, putting up with little pesky problems like that. But by it was, it was kind of an eye opening, you know, and I'm a disease nerd, you know, I like, I like, I like this stuff, but there's these certain moments where you see and touch something and it kind of hits different. And that was one of those moments, you know, like here's, here's a year and a half old male, you know, in this area that, that literally fell over dead in a riparian corridor on the Buffalo river. From cwd. And that's just kind of a jarring moment. But again, that can happen. But you can also harvest in the same population a four and a half old male that looks okay. But both things happen. And over time as you get more one of the hallmarks as it sets in, those younger age classes start to become a little more commonly infected and then that clock ticks earlier.

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[Cal]

How much of the conversation like legitimate conversation is there around CWD resistant deer? Obviously State of Oklahoma is going great guns in a way that I think is concerning and I don't honestly know how it's legal to release game farm animals that are quote unquote CWD resistant that unless they know also how to read state boundaries and maps and things to stay in Oklahoma. How much like is there a conversation there of of identifying deer that do have a resistance or long term carriers to the point where it just never manifests or like what is the so.

[Mark Ruder]

We know with cwd, you know say in white tailed deer like that again that that prion protein gene they'll refer to it as the PRNP gene. We've known for a long time that certain genotypes, so the basically the configuration of that gene, certain genotypes are less susceptible doesn't mean resistant. It means they aren't as commonly infected. And when they are infected, typically what happens to your point Steve earlier, that incubation period is longer. So those deer with certain genotypes might, rather than heading downhill at two years after, maybe that pushes out to three years after, four years after. Right. So that's been known. That's a thing. Right. But they ultimately will, to our conversation earlier, if they live through all, if they dance through all the other flaming hoops of deer mortality causes, they'll ultimately bite it from chronic wasting disease. So we can't manipulate that, but mother nature can. If there's adequate selection pressure, those more favorable, like less susceptible genotypes, historically in most like free ranging populations are not well represented. Right. It's the exception. Those more like those less susceptible CWD genotypes are the exception, not the rule. So kind of in a simple sense, I'm not a geneticist, but it tells you that there's not adequate selection pressure on that. Right. Fitness is greater in some of these other ones. So there's concern there. But as CWD sets in and selection pressure hits, you know, maybe I would anticipate that in some of these populations we start to see that and they've, they've, they've started to do some of that work in, in mule deer populations in, in Colorado, you know, where they've seen a little bit of a shift maybe to some of these less susceptible, you know, genotypes. But again, this is, this is, takes time. Takes time and I, there's a lot of smart people working on that, but I do think it's going to take time. To your point though, relative to the issue in Oklahoma, so on the farm served industry, that's where that sort of desire originated. Right. Let's try to selectively breed white tailed deer that are resistant to cwd. And they're doing some new approaches. It's genome wide, so they're looking at the whole genome and all the other, you know, genes within the body that might impact susceptibility. And so that has bled out into, you know, it's kind of been talked about as the great hope in some degree. Right. And, and I think that's because this is a, it sucks to talk about this disease. It's just not, it's not a great disease to talk about. We don't have clear solutions and so here, let's, let's try to march down this path of, you know, let's breed our way out of this, you know.

[Cal]

Because it can seem more proactive in certain circles than. Well, there's this naturally occurring test that's going on in Colorado mule deer. And in a few decades or longer, we might have something that comes out.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

We want a silver bullet. That's the bottom line. We want something that will fix this. And I think, you know, a few things that, that Mark said I think are important. There's a dis. Difference between resistant and less susceptible. There's context there. The other thing to go back to Steve's question is, you know, so if you have, if you have an animal that lives an extra two years longer because he has a different genotype, he's still spreading the prion in the environment for two additional years. Mm, right. So that, that. I get it from the standpoint of that those deer are living longer, but if they have the disease, they're still contributing to. To transmission. They're still, you know, there's still prions that they're putting into the environment. And you know, I think my perspective from the genetic standpoint is I think the scientific community recognizes that genetics may be one tool that we have at our disposal, but we're not there yet as a scientific community. And the idea that you're going to. I look at it as like antlers, antler quality, that you're going to take deer of a certain antler quality and release them into the environment and expect them to elevate the antler quality for the entire herd, given that deer whitetails are promiscuous, is kind of crazy to think that. And when I looked at kind of this scenario, I thought, okay, so the idea that you're going to release animals into the wild, regardless of where they go from when they're released, and that's going to immediately change how this population is functioning. I think that logically, to me doesn't. Doesn't make sense.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you think it might have that. That might have an application if the worst fears come true? We wind up the areas that have CWD, whether it's 20 years down the road, 30 years down the road, 40, whatever, that it's going to wind up being that you're going to have, you know, 70% prevalency and you're going to have a deer to per square mile.

[Mark Ruder]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like if, if it lands there at that point, that might become. We might land in a place where that is a conversation that Warrants happening.

[Mark Ruder]

That the thing that, you know, with, I think within the fence, inside the fence, you know, they're going to go down this path. And if that leads to lowering risk of things getting out of control inside the fence, that could be a favorable thing. I would not prefer it to be happening. In replacement of surveillance, biosecurity, all of these routine standard methods we do to prevent and manage disease in animal populations, that stuff has to invigorate and maintain in the face of this new tool, if it's potentially, you know, useful. The fact is right now it's still in that investigation phase. Right. Science is going to take time to understand if this is a tool that can be leveraged within captive servant populations. And so that research should continue. But I think people are so desperately wanting an answer and a solution, a silver bullet, whatever the case may be, that we elevate it before it should be elevated as a tool. It's not a tool in the toolbox right now.

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[Cal]

Because at one point in time, if there was cwd, it was almost certainly associated with a captive servant facility. Now we're much further down the road and the state of Oklahoma is, is very serious about allowing the captive servant industry in that state to grow and sell deer that those breeders have determined to be tolerant or resistant to CWD by their own standards. Meaning that they, they're just going to live a little bit longer and then sell those outside of the fence for 600 bucks a pop to people in the state of Oklahoma.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it's, it's, it's that, that feels a little crazy. Like if you were trying to control a typhoid outbreak and you had, you're like, well, listen man, normal people get typhoid and they die in six months. This guy, he'll, he'll die in a year, but he's got typhoid the whole time. We'll send him over to your area for, for decades. It does seem like someone will be.

[Mark Ruder]

Like, wow, yeah, for decades. To your point, the whole focus of, you know, the, from, from USDA state agriculture agencies and state wildlife agencies has been separation of captive cervids and wild cervids. Right. We need separation of these two populations for disease purposes. So to start suddenly talking about the idea of opening the fence and releasing captive bred animals that are selectively bred for the traits that humans think are favorable, not for what mother nature thinks is favorable, there's no place for that in my opinion right now. It's just there's. We live in a world with wildlife disease of unintended consequences. There's always unintended consequences that are hard to predict. And it'd be super challenging to have a. Have enough assurances that, that, that those animals are, you know, not going to put the populations at.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Is it plausible that you're releasing something else into the environment?

[Cal]

Oh, yeah. I mean, listen to that. You hear that?

[Steven Rinella]

Cal's wildlife disease book.

[Cal]

That's. That's a whole book of wildlife diseases just found in the Southeast. We're only talking about one.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, let's go. Let's take northwest. Is it northwest Arkansas? Okay, Northwest Arkansas, southwest Wisconsin. Here you got prevalency. You know, hunters, they're the 40% of the deer they kill, 50% of the deer they kill have sub CWD. Deer populations had a new form of mortality. Used to be hunting and predation. Now it's hunting, predation. CWD. CWD is killing 20% of the deer herd. The deer herd is going down, down, down, down, down. What is the recommendation? I mean, like, like, what do you wind up doing with that information? I mean, do you say, no more hunting because we're going to run out of deer? Do you say, hey, kill more deer because somehow that'll fix the problem? Like, what do you tell people?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, as a scientist, what we told the agency is we don't design regulations or.

[Steven Rinella]

I know, but I'm asking you, step outside of that.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, but what, what we did is we told the agency, this is where you are.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

This is where you're headed. And this is how many deer per square mile you have. We think. And this is what the future looks like.

[Steven Rinella]

How many? You figured they had. How many per square mile?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

About one to five, depending on.

[Steven Rinella]

Unbelievable. And then you think they're headed where.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It really depends on, you know, various factors, but I think potentially lower than that. Well, I mean, right now, in her. In the one the highest prevalence area, Mark and I talked about this over coffee this morning. From spending time there, you can't. You can't find deer. They're like, you can drive around at night, you don't see deer. You can drive around looking for deer, and you. You don't see deer. And so, you know what? Mark alluded to this earlier. I mean, you're going to get to some point where the population is going to stabilize and it's going to increase, but it's not going back to where it was. And so where it goes and how quickly it gets there could be influenced by regulation. So to your question, you know, should the Agency. I'm not going to tell the agency, but could the agency consider basically taking the foot off harvest and instead of liberalizing harvest, like many agencies do, thinking they're low on the curve? Now when they're up high on the curve, do we take our foot off the gas? Do we reduce dough harvest? Do we, you know, do we change our behavior? Because now we're in a new normal. And I think the answer is yes, because you're going to try. At that point, the agency's goal, I would think logically would be recovery now. Now, what's this going to look like in the next few decades? And we know we're not going back to where we were 40 years ago, but we have to get this population sustainable. And from the standpoint of, you know, I'm thinking about this as a deer hunter. I grew up in an area of Virginia when at the time, if you saw a deer, you had. That was a great hunt. If you killed a deer, I was telling Mark, we would take Polaroids, brown deer, we shot brown deer, we would take a Polaroid and go to school on Monday and show it. And it was like you. You had struck the lottery, you know, and then I fast forward to where I am now and trying to raise kids and mentor young people through becoming deer hunters. They have to be successful. They have to see animals. They have to be able to grasp the fraternity of what you're doing and the success, and you build off of that. And then they want to learn about the process of managing for deer and all this. That goes away if you can't see animals and you can't harvest animals. So as a deer hunter, I would look at the agency and say, I need you as an agency to think about how to get. What does the future need to look like to recover this population to the point where I can see animals, I can harvest animals. And we know that prevalence is not going to stay at that super, super high level. It's going to reduce through time.

[Steven Rinella]

You think so?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yes. And we hope to get it. You know, it's some. Something where you're. You're not dealing with what you're dealing with now, which is, you know, every. Every other animal and most bucks are testing positive.

[Steven Rinella]

You think it'll go. You think it has the capacity to then go the other direction to climb, climb, climb to 50, 60, 70% and then hit some point when prevalency goes down?

[Mark Ruder]

I don't think it would go back down to.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It will still.

[Mark Ruder]

It'll be chronically high. Yeah, you Know, it might come up and then just kind of level out and then wobble back and forth as you get recruitment and whatnot. And that would happen.

[Cal]

But the effect there, Michael, to your point, is like people aren't going to want to hunt in that area. And so like the, the hunting participation in that zone and the culture around hunting is going to suffer alongside the low population prevalence.

[Mark Ruder]

And this is the, this is the challenge with CWD is you hit that, that chronic steady state of this is the new normal, right. We hear a lot about ehd, right. And so we've had multiple large scale EHD outbreaks where like even in a given county, thousands of deer like that, Right. In one transmission season you might kill thousands of deer indiscriminately. Right. The sky's falling, people back off of hunting that year. We've got multiple examples though, through time of within a few years that population is right back to where it was or even beyond where it was.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I've like personally, I'm old enough where I've personally lived through the cycle, right.

[Mark Ruder]

And that's where this is so different. Right. And this is why this matters is like with ehd, you can get on the other side of it and get back to the normal state. With cwd you don't, you just go to this new state of normal. And that's what we're trying to define of what that is. And that's where like, you know, in Wisconsin, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, part of West Virginia, like trying to figure out what that new normal state looks like. And I do think it's important too to mention, like you mentioned, backing off a does, for instance. I think it's a confusing point to hunters that, that don't have the misfortune or pleasure, whatever the case may be, of seeing the bad spots and the not so bad spots because you might be in an area and your interaction with CWD is very early in that scale. Right. There's just a couple detections in the state or in a county. And what do they do? They liberalize most take.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right.

[Mark Ruder]

And so they're doing the opposite. And I think, I think many folks, that's a little bit confusing based on what phase of the disease you are in the management agency seemingly on the surface level, doing completely different things. They're telling me not to shoot those. They're telling me to shoot those. It can be a little bit confusing, but it's all relative to that long protracted timescale. And in the early phase you're trying to prevent from getting to that bad phase and that's what all those actions are doing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I can picture it if this place in Arkansas, Arkansas, that's got one to five per square mile. I just can't picture that they'd still be in the mind frame of we're going to do earn a buck. We're going to do. You can hunt deer through February.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right? Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, because you're playing with fire at that point.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Right. And we don't know, I mean, we tried to simulate what prevalence would look like, you know, through time. But again we, we kept, we capture a five year snapshot of this population in Arkansas and it was extremely well done. Science is rigorous, but it's five years of data and we're trying to predict out to Mark's point, prevalence gets to some level, it's 50% right here and then in the next county over it's 30% or whatever. So you've already got some complexity there. So we, we're trying to inform the agency on where are you going to be? It's not going to disappear, but where are you going to be? Is prevalence going to remain high in parts of the landscape? It's probably going to remain high in other parts of the landscape. When it kind of starts oscillating to Mark's point and going up and down slightly, it very likely will remain at a prevalence that is at least palatable. Moving forward, you're going to, you're still going to have situations where you're going to have a deer that you harvest that test positive, but it's not going to be at the scale at which it is now, which is most are prevalent.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you think there's a way that you could have, do you think there's a way you could have a county, Texas, Illinois, wherever the hell we'll say there's a county in Texas that has 1% prevalency today. Okay. Is there a way that in 40 years that county will have the same deer density and 1% prevalency?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

See, that's part of why we're having this conversation. Those questions are incredibly difficult, almost impossible to answer because there's so many factors that influence the transmission and accumulation. I mean, we know vegetative communities, soil types, deer density, social behaviors. There's so many factors that influence how this disease is operating on the landscape that there could literally be a thousand different scenarios. And that's part of why it's so difficult to have these conversations with hunters, to Mark's point, is like, well, I See that this is occurring over here, and I see that this is occurring over here. And that doesn't make any sense to me. They should be doing the same thing. And so to Mark's point, you know, northwest Arkansas, that the context needs to be that this population is so far along on this curve and the disease has progressed the way it has here, but it's not going to operate like that everywhere. Yeah, there's going to be situations where it's going to operate very differently. And then. So that context is lost on us as hunters. And I. I see the frustration as a hunter, and you seem to be.

[Steven Rinella]

Getting frustrated over here.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, as a scientist, I don't even know what to do as a scientist, damn it. I want to solve. I want this to be solved. And as a deer hunter, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want you to tell me that I have to behave differently. I don't want you to tell me that this thing that I've worked, let's say 50 years to groom this piece of property suddenly is. Is all undermined by.

[Steven Rinella]

You got to be all scared of your burgers.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. And I don't want. I don't want there to be conversations where there are people that are telling the public that the science is a lie. I don't want to be in that discussion either. But that's where we are with this disease. And all of this creates confusion, and the confusion creates nihilistic kind of attitudes. Nothing's worked. To hell with it. Let's just quit. And I just. I don't see that looking through the two lenses I'm looking through as an option.

[Mark Ruder]

And to your 1% question, my wheels had to turn for a minute on that. I'm a. I'm a thinker. No, it's not going to stay the same. You know, if you. Mother Nature has done that experiment for us. Right. You know, if. Because it's operated, you know, cryptically underneath, hiding in plain sight, right in front of us. Right. No interventions, status quo. Right. What did it do? Goes up, it climbs. I mean, you know, there's just nothing, you know, without. Without intervention, CWD has proven to us over time that it will do two things. It will. The percentage of deer in that population that are infected with cwd, it's going to increase. And then the geographic footprint of where it is on the landscape, that's also going to increase. Like, those are the two things that we know with absolute certainty are going to happen over the years, and that.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Expansion is going to take time.

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[Steven Rinella]

So in your professional opinions, if you're in a like, an area that has very low prevalence here, they just found their first case and your professional opinions is if your option, if you choose the option of ignore it and do nothing. In your professional opinion, decades down the road, you will be living under a new normal and it won't just be that you wished it away.

[Mark Ruder]

Correct? Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't see, I don't see a scenario where, you know, if it's just one deer on the landscape, right, and it, it dies, it's not consumed and some, you know, somebody covers it up with a driveway, okay, maybe it's sealed in there. It's not coming anywhere. But like, but other than that, you know, the, these will, will fester. It will smolder until it's visible, you know, years down the road.

[Steven Rinella]

Can you guys. Is it what blocks someone? What prevents a researcher from getting some whitetail deer in captivity and experimenting with different transmission things? Meaning it's only you take a deer, it never comes in contact with another deer.

[Mark Ruder]

You.

[Steven Rinella]

Allow an infected deer to graze a one acre pasture for a week Pull that deer away and kill it. Then you take a known clean deer that doesn't have interaction in their deer, and you let it go graze on that pasture. And then you see. Does it get CWD from grazing on the pasture? Like, did it happen that way?

[Mark Ruder]

That's been done. That kind of work gets done.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you remember a few years ago, all this hysteria came out? Like, if you took stainless steel and you, like, cut a deer up on stainless steel and then scrubbed it and bleached it, it could still. I'm like, oh, bullshit. You know, I mean, like, theoretically, sure, but like, people aren't getting it that way. Or like deer aren't getting it off stainless steel.

[Mark Ruder]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Like. Like, how are they getting it?

[Mark Ruder]

I'm. That's a. It's a. You know, for as much as we know about chronic wasting disease, there's a lot we don't know about chronic wasting disease.

[Steven Rinella]

Does the. Does the deer get it? Who only goes and grazes on the pasture?

[Mark Ruder]

Well, that's one possibility, and it's been shown. So. So Colorado Parks and Wildlife, they did a study where they had, you know, a decomposed carcass from a clinical CWD animal. Like, by decomposed, I mean bleach, white bones gone years. Put deer in there and they get infected. They do, they do. Just not other deer in there just go into that.

[Steven Rinella]

Clean deer in.

[Mark Ruder]

Clean deer in. Dirty deer come out.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, that's what I'm saying. So this has been demonstrated.

[Mark Ruder]

That has been done. But the exact mechanisms, right? Is it eating soil? Is it chewing on a bone? Is it getting it in a plant? The exactly how it gets in there, they don't understand yet. But most of the evidence suggests that it's like oronasal.

[Steven Rinella]

So, like, the highest chance is oral.

[Mark Ruder]

Nasal, through the nose, through the mouth is the highest chance. But there's multiple modes of transmission, you know, potentially. And so, you know, so deer can get it through their social direct contacts with one another, which obvious. You know, a lot of transmissible diseases are like that. The thing, the curve. One of the curve balls that CWD has is exactly what we just talked about. The environment, the habitat. Right? And that's where, you know, if. If you can become sick or infected just from the habitat, which almost acts like a host. When I look at through my lenses, I look at the landscape, I look at the habitat as a host, just like I look at a deer as a host. And the importance of that host, based on what we've seen so far in some literature, is that the importance of that habitat as a source of infection for deer becomes greater the farther up that curve in the timescale you get. The more deer die, the more deer pee and poop and just, you know, live on the landscape, the more of those CWD prions are going to be put into that environment. And so as you get those prevalence, you know, of 30%, 40%, 50% of the deer, that's a lot of, a lot of pee, that's a lot of poop, that's a lot of saliva, that's a lot of flesh that goes onto the landscape and those prions just stick around. And so trying to control prevalence, right, trying to keep lower down that scale will, will in theory hopefully help minimize that environmental contamination. Right. And so like Mike mentioned earlier, feeding and baiting, right, those focal spot on the landscape put a lot of deer, which also pee and poop and other things. So you're, you're potentially depositing like sort of a hyper focused area of prions on the landscape that would put a deer at greater risk of infection if it forages there. That's what all those regulations try to sort of get at is like, okay, let's try to lower that risk. And that's why baiting and feeding are a common, you know, a common point of intervention for the state because you know, you're just trying to break the chain of infection, right? Like, what can we do that will try to lower risk on the landscape? For deer encountering cwd, whether it's from another deer or from its habitat, someone.

[Steven Rinella]

Should make a handy chart. The chart would be 0 to 5.

[Mark Ruder]

Here's what you do.

[Steven Rinella]

Try this 5 to 10 or like 0 to 3. Try this, right?

[Mark Ruder]

Well, it would help.

[Steven Rinella]

And when you get to 30 or 40, I guess that's where I'm like, I find my confusion. Is that 30 or 40, is it just say like try to enjoy your last bit of great deer hunting.

[Mark Ruder]

Well, and I think that more information.

[Steven Rinella]

To come soon, the suggestions kind of run out.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Well, and I think that's, I mean that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is that there is no blanket prescription for this. And that just creates complexity and confusion. And so that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is where you're at on the curve matters. And some of these prescriptions that agencies are taking, like the banning feeding and liberalizing harvest, those are applicable at the bottom of the curve. But when you get up to the top of the curve, as we now see that, because we, the data are emerging from these populations that are high up the curve now. It's taken some time to get those field studies.

[Cal]

That's an unfortunate takeaway for some of our naysayer crowd. Yeah, right. Like, well, you better be testing and turning in your deer because that's your best shot at being able to bait again. Well is if the prevalence, if you show the prevalence is high.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

And the bottom line is, you know, there was a recent summary, National Academy of Sciences put this kind of state of, the state of where we are with cwd. And in, in the, in the preface it says basically to paraphrase, albeit not perfect efforts to manage the disease, the progression and spread of this disease are our option right now. So you have this group of scientists that come from all these different perspectives that collectively agree that it's not perfect. The management strategies that agencies are implementing, they're not perfect, but they are where we need to be right now, given how much we don't know about this disease. And there's just so much we don't know and it takes so much time.

[Cal]

Yeah, because I mean the blue sky scenario really could be to be able to manipulate the new normal.

[Mark Ruder]

Right.

[Cal]

So like right now you're like, yeah, we probably, if it, if the new normal levels out at 40% prevalence, we're probably not going to get lower than that. But maybe that is the, the ultimate goal is to be able to reduce those new normals or be able to manipulate them to some degree. Ideally. Right. If, if you, through people turning in voluntary testing and, and good communication, you establish that new normal at 5, 10% prevalence. Is that, yeah. Realistic sounding?

[Mark Ruder]

I mean it all sort of depends on where you're at in the scale. I think some of those sort of real world experiments can be happening especially sort of in parts of the west with some mule deer populations where you have, okay, you're at this high prevalence now what management actions or harvest sort of quotas could we get to try to drop this back down a lot of like where that intervention happens a little bit. The goal would be happen earlier right. Before you get to this sort of 30, 40%. Like you're up at the 5, 8, 10, 12, like, okay, let's be aggressive and try to knock this, see if we can through harvest and through our hunters decrease prevalence and stabilize prevalence. Right. And so that's where a lot of the effort comes in is again trying to, trying to prevent the climb up, you know. And I think now there will be like once we get to that mountaintop, I Guess and trying to understand the new norm. Then it's like, what triggers are there? What levers can be pulled to manipulate that? Are there some, you know, can we bring it back down?

[Steven Rinella]

I got two yes. No questions for you guys. But you can only do yes.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

No, man, we don't. That's tough for scientists. It always depends.

[Steven Rinella]

Because it's guessing. It's just guessing. No one's going to hold you to this. It's just crystal ball guessing.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

We both know that that is fundamentally a lie.

[Steven Rinella]

In 25 years. In 25 years, will there be counties in the eastern half of the United States where CWD has not been detected?

[Mark Ruder]

Yes.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I agree.

[Cal]

That's fast.

[Steven Rinella]

If I made you a hamburger, I keep wanting to do this. I'm gonna. I. I have five CWD positive deer, and I handle them just like normal. I bone them out.

[Cal]

I make burger, which is a mix between the five.

[Steven Rinella]

I got five CWD positives. Make me a burger. This is my. This is my thing. For a while, I was like, the only CWD deniers I'm interested in talking to are the ones that eat this burger. I take five CWD positive deer, I grind it all up, and I make a normal old burger. I grill that burger to medium. I know it doesn't matter, but I could grill to medium. And I'm like, would you like a bite of that burger? The ones that eat the burger, I'm like, I'd like to hear what you think about cwd. The ones that don't eat the burger, I understand how you feel.

[Mark Ruder]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But the ones that are like, it's no big deal. I'm like, you eat that burger and tell me it's no big deal. Okay. If I made said burger, would you take a bite?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

No.

[Mark Ruder]

No, you wouldn't.

[Steven Rinella]

Me neither. So it kills me. Would you eat it, Phil?

[Mark Ruder]

Oh, no, I don't think so.

[Steven Rinella]

Get me the biggest burger in London.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Five quid.

[Steven Rinella]

It's so funny, though, because CWD burger.

[Cal]

In London, meat side of things, like the. It's in a direct attack on my ability to make stock, which is horrible, Right?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Because you know all the you're not supposed to do. You, like, got the backbone in there and everything.

[Cal]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Spine turns all white.

[Cal]

And for the longest time, like, all. Everything I did came out of the woods on my back, typically a long way. So some of this, you'd be like, oh, yeah, no bones, no problem. But then, like, you get that big bull elk in a CWD management zone right on the side of the Road magically, you're like, oh, my God.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I'm making, like, T bones and shit, you know? And then you get all scared about it. That's what continues to kill me.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, yeah, I totally understand.

[Steven Rinella]

It continues to kill me. And I know that's not what you guys are here to talk about, but, like, I worry about, like, I've proposed this to a bunch of people, and I don't know if there's a good way to do it. It'd be like, I wish someone would have started a long time ago. Go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin. Okay. Used to be, like, for a while, that was like, big bucks, you know, big buck central moves around the country. Like, big buck central was Alberta, Big buck central was whatever. Illinois, Big buck central Kansas. You know, just. It hops around. There's multiple big buck centrals at any given time. But they move. The places people are excited about move. Buffalo county had like, a. For a while, they were big buck central. Like, go into areas. I wish they'd done it 10 years ago and start being like, man, let's track, like, Boone and Crockett entries and overlay Boone and Crockett entries, countywide, statewide, whatever, with CWD prevalency and be like. Or some way like, is if you just like to hunt big bucks and you're an antler guy, and I'm like, 50% antler guy. I'm 50% a burger guy. But, like, are we seeing that, like, antlers are going away from cwd? If someone demonstrated that, it would change a lot of the conversation people were having. But it would need to be, like, not need to be. That would. That would impact people's behaviors. It would impact people's perspectives to see where it's headed. But just the uncertainty is just like. It just kills me. But, you know, it's been killing me now for. How many years has it been killing me? It's been killing me for my entire adult life. The uncertainty.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Exactly. And the fact that this disease is so complex. We want answers. We don't like working under uncertain conditions. We don't like being told, well, you can't do this the way you've been doing it. Well, why? Well, we can't give you an answer, a precise answer for this question that you're asking, because we don't know. And when somebody, particularly a scientist, says, we don't know, I've said I don't know several times today. It's because we don't know. And if you. I mean, all we can do is acknowledge what we know and what we can demonstrate with, with rigorous data. And if we don't have the data, we just have to say we don't, we don't know the answer to that. That doesn't sit well with us as society.

[Steven Rinella]

No, that's why the one certainty I have is whatever we're spending on research. I'd be like, oh, let's quadruple it. I'll find the money somewhere. I'll find something dumb that we spend money on and make that go away so we can spend four times as much money on research so that like, I don't know, maybe my kids don't have to be paranoid about this for their entire adult life.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. And one thing that doesn't help with CWD at all. It counterproductive is you have narratives, you have myths, you have nonsense that, that gets that Mark and I were talking about this on the drive over here. That just consumes state agency personnel and resources and time. They spend more time dealing with bullshit than they do trying to actually do their job and try to understand what's going on. And, and you, you put all that, you know, in a hat and you have something that's so, so complex, that is cryptic to Mark's point, that you don't see it, that it takes generations to, to kind of manifest itself and really get going. And you, and I think in year to year, month to month terms, and now you're talking, you know, now you have Covid and the skepticism of science in general, and you put all of that together and you've got a soup of crap that surrounds this disease. And then, then that's what we work in. We work in that soup. We're trying to provide data to inform decisions and have conversations that are difficult to have. Nobody wants, I don't want to think about this in the future, but it's an unfortunate reality on the landscapes that I hunt and I, that I do science on. And so you put all that together and it's, it's, it's, it burns your energy. And that, that's what you see when you talk to state agency personnel in these states that have these high prevalence rates. It is a gut punch to them. I mean, they, their morale is down. They just are like, what, what do we do? Like, there, there's no answer that's going to work today. And the skeptical public wants an answer yesterday. And that's just not the way that this works. And that as a colleague to these agency biologists, that's frustrating to me because I see what they're going through. And I see that there are people in the public saying that the agencies, you know, this is a positive because they can get federal money, for God's sake.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Give me a break.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that idea. Like, I know plenty of people that are in wildlife management. The fact that, like, that there's this idea that someone that some biologist, some deer biologist sitting there, and they get a positive in his region. Yeah. He's like, oh, goody. Yeah, now I'll be able to buy that new car. It's like, are you kidding me?

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Their shoulders.

[Steven Rinella]

It's so. It's like, so cynical and grotesque.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah. Yeah. It's like they just found out that. Think about it like this. You're the director of a state agency that just discovered CWD in your state for the first time. Everything just changed. Everything.

[Steven Rinella]

And he's like, oh, good.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Everything just changed for that part.

[Mark Ruder]

That man.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Or worse.

[Cal]

And if you're a director of a state agency, you're already well aware that the subtlest changes in your state regulations for anything.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yep.

[Cal]

Cause, yes, quite. The public uproar.

[Steven Rinella]

License went up. $2.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Cal]

Yeah. And now they're doing what with snapping turtles? I don't. I don't catch them, but, boy, I got an opinion on it.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Now everything changes for these biologists, and. And. And it trickles down from the director all the way to the field staff. Everything changes about the way they do their jobs, the resource flow within the states change. Everything changes. And the idea that that is a positive. The amount of federal money that's allocated to deal with CWD is literally pennies to what it costs state agencies to deal with the consequences of this disease. So this myth that it's a money grab, it's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. It's the exact opposite of that. It is a money loss. It's a morale killer. It causes these state agency biologists to put their hands up, particularly in states like, you see in Arkansas, where, you know, you can. You can feel it, like, in the room, you can feel it. You can feel the conversations about how exasperated they are. It's like, my gosh, this is where we're at, and this is where we're headed. And it's just. You can feel it suck the air out of the room.

[Cal]

Well, I mean, you're not on controllable timelines, right? And it's like the. The old gentleman that you talked about, like, made his dream become a reality. He's been planning and scheming on this Legacy whitetail property or just family ranch. Right. It's like how much of the. The planning has been done in the absence of real nature and real conditions. Right. But it's like, yeah, this is the way it's going to be and this is the way it's going to be. And like, it just takes time. It's not going to happen on our.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Timeline, no matter what I think about the other side, because I, I have friends that are on the other side. Well, then what do we do? Nothing's working. To hell with it. Let's just. And the science shows that if you can keep prevalence to where CWD is not a relevant source of mortality, if you can keep prevalence low, then the future is not going to look like it's going to look. If you put your hands up in the air and turn around and walk off. Yeah, that's just the reality.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's clear. And I guess what people are going to be waiting on is if you don't do that and things go to hell, what do you try? And maybe sometime down the road there'll be some clarity about that. But I think if you're in the low area, I'd aim for low.

[Cal]

Right. If you like the way things are right now, your best chance of getting somewhere close to that is.

[Mark Ruder]

And that's where. Across the landscape. You know, in these areas where, you know, we don't think CWD exists, even if it's part of a state that has cwd, you know, all of the effort and energy should be at prevention. Still, you know, I think, I think there's this other narrative out there of, you know, we look at the states, what are we up to? 35. I don't even remember because it changes. But then it's like, okay, well, that's.

[Steven Rinella]

35 states where it's been detected.

[Mark Ruder]

Where it's been detected. Right. Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, it's been hard to follow because we keep almost getting new states.

[Mark Ruder]

Right, right, right, right. But, you know, like, it's almost like, you know, some, some people are like, up. That state's positive now. Whatever. It's done.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, I got you to your 1.

[Steven Rinella]

It's a bad way of thinking about it.

[Mark Ruder]

It's a bad way of thinking about it because to your question earlier, Steve, about in 25 years, is there going to be a county that's not detected in. In the state or in the. In the southeast? Right. Those places where we know it not exists, the whole effort of people in that area should be to prevent it from coming. So we often throw prevention to the side because it's a pain in the ass and it interferes with our way of doing things and what we want to do and how we've done it in the past. But the alternative is not great. I would much rather live in a shroud of prevention.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Mark Ruder]

Than one of reaction and frustration and control.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Meaning the fight shouldn't start when you find your first case. The fight should start before you find your first kid.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That's an excellent point. Very good point.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. All right, guys, we gotta wrap up, man. I appreciate you coming on.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Thank you for having us.

[Steven Rinella]

And I appreciate just like the. You're talking about wildlife managers being frustrated. You know, like, I appreciate you guys entertaining a conversation that just, like, is. It's hard. It is like, it is frustrating because, like, you're coming on, you know, you're coming on with, with having done research and expert opinion, and you're just in a situation where you got to have a lot of, like, I don't know, I don't know. It's got to feel a lot better when you come on and be like, here's the deal. Yeah, yeah, we're do X, we're gonna do Y, we're gonna do Z, we're gonna fix this.

[Cal]

But what is like the at home takeaway right now for folks going into their deer season?

[Mark Ruder]

I always say. I mean, and I appreciate you for entertaining this topic.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Mark Ruder]

With, you know, your audience. Because I think, I think as much as individuals can just be engaged, care, you know, and understand sort of the, the, you know, it's not, you know, some of these restrictions and quirky regulations and confusion around that. It's, it's all from a place of trying to prevent a really big problem in the future. And so trying to just, you know, embrace that and, you know, be an active participant in what the wildlife agencies need, that's one of the things I always lean into and be willing to.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I mean, from my perspective, I talk to hunters all the time that, that have various narratives that we've talked about today. Their minds, you know, their mindset is different than mine. I don't expect you to listen to this podcast and change everything you think about cwd. But if you will just sit back and just think carefully about the issues we've talked about and recognize that there's no, there's no answer. There's no clear answer right now. This is going to take time. There's always context involved. But if you're willing to at Least entertain that there is work going on that's showing these things that we've talked about, that this is a problem that is not going to just go away. To Mark's point, you not getting it in your area is important. And so I kind of look at it from the deer season framework is one I don't want CWD where I'm trying to hunt. And if I have it there, then I'm going to have to behave differently because the agency is going to implement changes to try to keep prevalence low. And that is key. Not getting it and keeping prevalence low. If you have it.

[Mark Ruder]

That's.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

That's kind of where I see it.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, man. Thanks again, guys.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Thank you.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, thank you for the book Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases in the Southeastern United States.

[Mark Ruder]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Which my first response upon seeing it is it shouldn't be that thick.

[Mark Ruder]

Unfortunately, it is.

[Steven Rinella]

Holy. I'm gonna read this to my kids at night.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, thanks, man.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. If you want a real, real eye burner. I don't know what you call this.

[Cal]

Well, it's a professional level book based off the intensity of the pictures. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, it's a professional book when I'm taking a non professional gander through here. And it's an alarming collection of photos which I think my kids would like.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah, we're still on. Okay. I was actually gonna ask Marco. There's a. There's a disease. There's something that causes wild turkey feathers to be like, soaking wet with like an oil all over them. Whoa. Have you seen that?

[Mark Ruder]

No, I haven't seen that.

[Steven Rinella]

It's not in this book.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

It's not in that book. And I've certain this book isn't complete.

[Mark Ruder]

You haven't said you haven't sent this one, Mike.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

No. We caught a hen in Louisiana, 2008, and she was soaking wet. Like, not wet. She had this oil all over her to the point where she looked terrible. And I put her in a capture box and it was greasy on the inside of the box. She was part of a brood. She. She had pulse with her. And I've searched for that. And I meant to ask you the other day about that.

[Mark Ruder]

And is that your only encounter with.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Only encounter ever.

[Mark Ruder]

Weird things happen. I mean, is there any chance she.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Got into a band of oil? She was in Cajun country, so she could have encountered anything.

[Mark Ruder]

Right, Right.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Yeah.

[Cal]

She ran through the deep fat fryer before she got to it.

[Mark Ruder]

Right. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Anyway.

[Steven Rinella]

Good lord, this book.

[Mark Ruder]

Yeah, we make that for that's intended for field biologists. So those, you know, most of our, the agency personnel in the Southeast kind of refer to that. So it's written for biologists. But no, I'm gonna, any hunter would enjoy it, I think.

[Cal]

Put this in the camper. You know, take my, my buddy's reading my buddy's 10 year old kid hunting with us this year. I'd be like, well, you just got to flip through that first before we.

[Mark Ruder]

But there's also some.

[Steven Rinella]

Glad you're not that deer.

[Mark Ruder]

There's also some normal stuff in there because disease is a part of life with wildlife, right? So you can have a healthy deer that also has a disease. And so there's lots of, you know, parasites we commonly see in wildlife and other things that would be of interest for, for hunters when they're dressing an animal.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm quite enjoying this book, man. All right, guys, thanks again.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

Thank you.

[Mark Ruder]

Thank you.

[Dr. Chamberlain]

See y'.

[Mark Ruder]

All.

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[Dr. Chamberlain]

Ah, come on.

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Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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